PERSONAL NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3030, 10 April 1912, Page 87

PERSONAL NOTES.

—By the death of his father, the Rev. Sir Erasmus Philipps, Lord Davids, better known as Mr VVynford Philipps, becomes the thirteenth holder of a baronetcy which was created in the reign of James I in 1621. The succession of a peer to a baronetcy is not usual. There is, however, a very recent instance of such a succession. On July 21 last Lord Maenaghten, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, succeeded on the death of his elder brother, the Right Hon. Sir Francis Edmund Maenaghten, who died without surviving male issuej to a baronetcy of which he is the fourth holder. The late Canon Sir James Erasmus Philipps, of Salisbury, author of a wellknown "Manual of Hymns and Prayers," was only one of several titled clergymen. The Mar ,-uis of Normanby is a clergyman who was for nearly 20 years Canon of St. George's Chapel, Windsor. There is a clerical earl in the person of the Right Hon. Francis Edward Cecil Byng, the present Earl of Strf.fford, who is bost remembered as a former Chaplain to the House of Commons, and Hon. Chaplain to Queen Victoria from 1867 to 1872. Then there is the well-known case of the Rev. Lord William Cecil, son of the late Marquis of Salisbury, who is the rector of Hatfield The Prince of Wales has his heart in tho right place, says a. London gossip. On the Arctic Sunday night, when leaving the special train which had taken Queen Alexandra anQ the- rest of the Royal party down to Portsmouth Dockyard to meet the home-coming King and Queen, lie exclaimed, "How perishing cold!" and expressed a desire to give the engine-driver and other men on the train something to warm themselves with. It was from his private purse, and with a personal message, that his Royal Highness sent a guinea to the driver, half a guinea to the stoker, and halt a guinea to each of the guaids. Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., speaking on his own education, says: "Don't go in for practical education. The most impractical form of education was the practical education. According to the intentions of iiis own people he was destined for an agricultural labourer. But whilst ho had the short opportunity of going to school ha was taught Latin and Greek. He was taught not for the purpose of being a professional man, but for the purpose of making him a pretty good ploughman. He was bound to confess -he was a considerable success as far as the ploughing was concerned." A curio expert of wide repute was Mr Herbert Lepper, who died in London the other day, at the age of 42. At an early age he was engaged as a clerk at Christie's rooms, but the value of his judgment on works of art and curios was soon discovered. As an expert he had few equals. He could tell almost at a glance whether an art curio was worth £IOOO or not. Nine years ago Mr Lepper was sent down to one of the residences of the late Marquess of Anglesey to make a survey. Going through an old lumber room his eye alighted on an ornament. This he speedily recognised as a valuable rock crystal curio worth thousands of pounds. A faw weeks later (lie article was put up at Christie's, and Mr Lepper's judgment was endorsed by a final bid of £4OOO. Zachary Macaulay, who will be commemorated, together with William Wilberforce and Thornton, for his great services in the abolition of slavery by a now church to be erected at Glapham Common, was the father of the famous historian, and had a large share in the formation of his mind and character. He imbibed his hatred of the slave trade at Sierra Leone, and once made a voyage in a slave ship in order to know personally the horrors of the "Middle Passage." Although an enthusiast in the cause he had at heart, he was not a man of one idea. He possessed encyclopedic knowledge on all the topics of the day, like his omniscient son, and Wilberforco when at a loss about any subject, used to say, "Let us look it out in Macaulay."

—Mr Rudolf Blind, whoso famous picture "The World's Desire," is before the courts again in London, is a well-known figure in artistic circles in London. He is the son of the lote Professor Karl Blind and the half-brother of the late Matilde Blind, while his own son, Mr Harold Blind, is a rising young writer. Mr Blind inherits his father's revolutionary ardours, and was lately seen conducting the triumph song of a demonstration from the plinth of the Nelson Column in Trafalgar square with his walking-stick. "The World's Desire," which is a large composition depicting woman and her admirers, attracted the pained attention of the authorities in 1892, when it became the subject of a Treasury prosecution at Bow street. Many eminent artists, including Ford Madox Brown and Staoey Marks, came forward in defence of the picture, and the late ,Sir James Vaughan, who then presided at Bow street, accepted their opinion and dismissed the summons.

Baron Aehrenthal, whose death took place in February, was in many respecrs a remarkable man. As "Minister of the Imperial House," be was a kind of confidential family lawyer to the Emperor. He know all about the "family jars." His finger was necessarily in most of the archducal pies. One (if his functions was to see that marriag© contracts were drawn up in accordance with Hapsburg statues, and another to obtain marriage dispensations from the Holy See. When morganatic marriages—and they do recur in Austria—or unions between archdukes and archduchesses and persons of slightly inferior rank were contracted. Baron Aehrenthal had the pWring duty of preparing and witnessing the formal acts and deeds of renunciation of all succession rights and privileges on the part of such archdukes and archduchesses. He was also responsible for the cure of all the money and property of the Imperial Family. The Marquis of Tullibardine would have been the heir to a kingdom as wel! as to the dukc.-V>m of Atholl if lie had lived a century and a-half ago. For it was only in 1765 that the House of Athole (as the name was spelt until 1893) relinquished the sovereignty of the Isle of Man. which had come into it■; possession earlier in that century after having been held by the Stanley family for a few hundred years. The Stanleys had originally been given the title of Kinsr, ho» while (ho Pukes of Athole held thi sovereignty they were styled Lords of the island. The claims were" ceded to the Crown in tin? firs! place for a, sum .-if £70,000. together with arr annuity, while only a little over 80 years ago the remain-

ing property and privileges were disposed of for another £400,000. Lord Tullibardine will eventually become Hereditary Sheriff of Perthshire, a post which was granted to an ancestor 500 years ago for rescuing James from the conspiracy of the Earl of Gowrie. The title under which the Dukes sit in the House of Lords is that of Earl Strange, an honour which was derived from the barony of the same name that came into the family with the old sovereignty of Man, through a descendant of the seventh Earl of Derby.

A very famous French preacher, Chas. Loysoli, better known as Pere Hyacinthe, has just died, aged 84. "Time was when the name of Pere Hyacinthe was in everyone's mouth," savs the Morning Post. "Towards the end of the Second Empire he drew all fashionable Paris to his sermons at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and all were agreed that his splendid diction and that magnificent voice of his, vhich reverberated through the stately edifice, recalled the days of the great Monarch and the eloquence of Bossuet and Bourdaloue. Then he broke with the Church of Rome, and it looked as though the result might bo the disruption of that in Franco The Catholic Church has escaped that, as it has escaped so many other dangers, but it cannot be doubted that the liberal ideas of the great preacher lave left their mark on modern French philosophy and literature. Almost his last conscious words were: 'I , can appear before Cod; I am at peace with my conscience and with my re'ason.' "

Sir F. A. Bosanquet is a distinguished lawyer, who comes from a stock of equally notable naval men. His brother is Sir Dav Bosanquet. Sir Frederick's appointment as Common Sergeant, which dates from 1900, was an extremely popular one with the Bar, for there is scarcely a sounder lawyer possessing the judicial mind than he. He also has at least one distinction which marks him out from the average judge—he never makes a joke in court. "Really," said the late Sir Frank Lockwood, to a friend, "I think you are the most sedate man at the Bar." "Have you carefully considered the claims of Bosanquet?" "the gentleman replied quietly. The historic Huguenot name borne by Sir Frederick has been the subject of controversies as to the correct method of pronouncing. At a Bar dinner, on one occasion, a slip was sent round for suggestions. One clever versifier, who to-day is a wellknown judge, perhaps with an eye to Sir Frederick's erudition, wrote : Take a B, two Q's, and K, Sealed—you have Bosanquet. Another wrote: Lively only at a banquet Is the barrister Bosanquet. Sir Frank Lockwood, who had his turn at the slip, rned it thus: You w. get no hanky-panky From tho barrister Bosanquet.

Although Edison is 65 years of ago he is in good health, though his hours are not such as would be healthy for most of us. He Still adheres to his system of only four and a-half hours' sleep every night, which h.-> began some years ago. He goes to bed at midnight and gets up at half-past 4, which, he says, gives him plenty of sleep and a good deal more time for work. His rules for long life and sound health I are simple. No one ought to worry, but simplv take things as they come, and not to eat too much. More people, he thinks, are killed from over-eating than from any oilier cause unless it be from drinking cocktails. 'I know nothing more devilish than the concoction called cocktail," he said, when asked as to his practices of eating and drinking. Mark Twain, too, -used to advise young men never to smoke during meals, and never to drink two glasses of wine at once. 1 Not only at Somersby was Mr Alfred Tennyson remembered, but away down at Gibraltar Point, on the Lincolnshire coast, I found that his nan: was a household word. Entering one day the only farmhouse, seen for miles, near Gibraltar Point, and falling to talk with its old inhabitant, who was just getting in his crop of pears, with which the earwigs had made sad havoc, the following conversation had ensued :—"Straangely-constitutrd things them battle-twigs is, as'God Omighty knaws; he dalled, if they hevn't gone with the best of my pears to year, and pears is as hard as owt. I nivver seed nobbut one as could manash them pears, as th' owd battle-twigs has manashed them, for sartin sewerness, and that was young Mr Alfred when he was a bov." "What young Mr Alfred was that?" I asked. "Why, Mr Alfred; you know Mr Alfred. Ivvery one in them da ays knew Mr Alfred hereabout, howiwer. You've heard tell of Mr Alfred Tennyson, the owd doctor's son, atraange friend of owd Mr Rownsley as built the house at Skcgsnest?" The- old fellow was wrong as to the builder, but I assented, and he continued: "He was straangen fond o' the jam as well as the pears, was Mr Alfred My missus 'ud saay, 'New, here's Mr Alfred a-cooming: we must git the jam ready;' and she would open the door and let cat out, for he was a regular boy for the cats, was Mr Alfred. I remember our cat, poor thing, went up smoke-hole one time when he eoomed in at the door, and Mr Alfred said, 'Your, cat is so shan, Mrs G .' and like enough, poor thing. Not that he meant owt, but eats is sensible things, anil they know who's who, mind ye. We haven't her.nl tell of him for years, but he grew up a straangen great man, I suppose, and addles his bread by his writ- ■ ings; Is worth some hundreds, they do say. I remember as if i! war nobbut yisterday, j my man, as was a fiddler bit of a fellow, ! was off to Hildred's theer at Skegsnest, to ! play fur quolitv at a dance; and he was cooming hoam in the morning early, and. be dashed, who should h'> light on but Mr Alfred, a-ranvin' and taavin. upon the sandhills in his shirt-sleeves an' all; and Mr Alfred said, saays he, 'Good morning,' saavs he; and mv man saays, 'Thou poor fool, thou doesn't knaw morning from night;' for you know. sir. i' them daavs we all thowt he was craazed. Well, well ! And the Queen wants to niaako him a lord, poor thing! Well. T nivver did hear the likes o' that, for sarten sewerness."—Canon Rawn-lry, in the Cornhil] Magazine.