SOME MORE HOWLERS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18552, 26 April 1930, Page 14 (Supplement)

SOME MORE HOWLERS

LITERATURE AND GRAMMAR. Masculine, man; feminine, woman; neuter, corpse. A Form 11. “autobiography:” I am a horse, I was born at a big farm with lots of other poultry. Dr. Johnson was a great cricketer, he also invented chloroform. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. This means that some kings’ crowms do not fit properly and the king’s head aches. A rolling stone gathers no moss means that, if you keep moving, you will not get fat. The past tense of “I want,” is “I got.” I Milton’s poetry is full of Biblical illu- | sions. Friends. Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Mark Antony was deaf, so he wanted the Romans to hark for him. Cleopatra was a very clever needle woman. Shakespeare was a very polite man. He often said “Go to,” but he never finished the sentence. New vereidii of “Burial of Sir John Moore:” We calved not a lion and we raised not a stone. Hir.'.ory and Politics. The Roundheads were so called because they had the Eton crop. “Get thee to a nunnery,” said Henry the Eighth, when Cromwell brought him Anne of Kleves to marry. Science and Mathematics. To collect fumes of sulphur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube. A therm is a germ that creeps into the gas meter and causes rapid consumption. Under what conditions will a body float in water? After it has been right in three days. The laws of chemical union are like" the laws of any other union, pretty | strict, and have a lot to do with blackI legs. I The air is composed of oxygen, nitro- ( gen and sanatogen.

RAPID REVIEWS. Mr Aldous Huxley, w'hose novel, ‘Point Counter Point,’ has been turned into a play, ‘This Way to Paradise,’ is publishing a ne».v book containing one long and several short stories. Professor Leonard Hill, the wellknown physiologist, who has written a children’s book called “The Jolly Tinker,” is the son of Dr. George Kirkbeck Hill, the great Johnsonian. The death occured last month, at the age of seventy years, of Mr Charles Whibley, man of letters and political pamphleteer. He was closely associated with Henley for many years, and later was the contributor of ‘Musings Without Method’ to ‘Blackwoods.’ He published many volumes of literary biography and criticism.

At a dinner held to celebrate the jubilee of the publishing firm of Benn Brothers, Limited, which fell last month, the chairman, Sir Ernest Benn, described the first gathering of the staff, which took place in 1887 in his father’s sitting room. The staff then numbered only 15 persons. He recalled how the late Sir John Benn, when an under-sized boy of 11, tramped in his mother’s Sunday boots from Stepney to Mincing Lane to earn ss. a week as a messenger. He said that the business w r as essentially a triumph of the spirit of individualism. They had a five-day- week and a profitsharing scheme, and nearly half the staff were shareholders. The wages bill of the publishing and administrative staffs which the firm employed was *£71,000 a year. The 1930 edition of the “South and East African Year Book and Guide,” which is published by the Union Castle Mail Steamship Company, Limited, contains a biblography of recent books relating to Africa, over 150 in number. The volume also contains plans of the African harbours. There is, besides the usual full particulars of information on all aspects of South and East Africa, a new map of Kenya and Uganda in the fine atlas of 64 pages. This book is of great use to the business man, settler, tourist and sportsman, who will find all information on any of their needs. Political and economical matters are fully dealt with. A Leeds man. who received a snowball letter bearing in its chain o" names that of Mr Bernard Shaw, wrote to Mr Shaw asking whether til 2 signature was genuine. He receiving the following characteristic reply:— “I have never signed nor passed on a

The completion of the Poetry Society’s 21st year was celebrated on February 21 by a luncheon in London.

chain or snowball letter of any kind, and I have never lost an opportunity of urging that the criminally thoughtless people who start or forward such things should be executed without benefit of clergy. I should be* glad to have my views made known as widely as possible, as some liar has put my name on a list of persons accompanying a chain letter now in circulation which, if its silly intention were carried out would break the backs of all the postmen and bankrupt all the postmasters-general in the world.”

Dr. Siegfried Trebitsch, who has just celebrated his sixtieth birthday, is the translator who rendered Bernard Shaw’s plays into German. He is himself a novelist and dramatist.

Mr Sinclair Lewis, the author of ‘Babbit’ and ‘Main Street,’ intends to devote the near future to a novel having to do with Labour. He expects that this work will “reduce his income very considerably.”

The manuscript of the second volume of Mr Compton Mackenzie’s novel, ‘Sinister Street,' has been presented to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is this volume which describes the Oxford period of the hero’s life.

Sir Cecil Harcourt- Smith, whose “Art Treasures of the Nation” appeared recently, has been Adviser for the Royal Art Collections since 1925. He also acts as adviser on art matters to the League of Nations, having as a colleague Mr John Galsworthy, who is the literary counsellor. “Females” is an amazing novel for women about women, by Jean Dewray. It is a profound study of a woman’s life, being the story of a family of females, some of whom object to what their father and elder sister, Lettie (a well-drawn character), are convinced is their inevitable lot of being deprived of what should be the natural course of their lives. Lettie tries to drag Lynnie along with her, scorning her love for a man whose wage is less than her own but Lynnie revolts; Chrissie, the second sister, runs away from the females to death; Estelle, to what is to the Martan’s, worse than death; and even Lettie, when her dearest friend flings away her “career” and listens to the call of the heart, lets Lynnie go to the man she loves to become a wife and mother, is shaken in her strong faith and at least sees the advantage in being a woman and not “just a female.” It is a quite unusual book.