BOOK NOTES.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18653, 23 August 1930, Page 14

BOOK NOTES.

Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.—Swift.

Miss Victoria Sackville-West, whose new novel. “The Edwardians,” is announced, won the Hawthomden Prize in 1927 with her poem, “The Land.” Miss Sackville-West is a niece of the present Lord Sackville. and a cousin of Mr Edward Sackville-West. the poet and novelist. In 1913 she married Mr Harold Nicolson, the biographer of Tennyson and Byron.

“Deadwood Dick” was no myth, nor was he a born American. His real name was Richard Clark, and he was bom at Handsborough. in Oxfordshire. He emigrated to the United States as a boy of sixteen, and after a period of gold prospecting became one of the riders of the pony express, which was so often attacked by Red Indians. With Custer he took part in the historic engagement at Black Hills, and here and elsewhere, with “Buffalo Bill,” he had an important share in the subjugation of the Indian tribes. He took his name from Deadwood City, South Dakota.

In “The Original Venus and Adonis’’ Mr H. Stonor Forrest maintains that the poem as originally written by Shakespeare has been subjected to systematic interpolation by other poets. —Professor Gilbert Murray has tackled one of his most difficult jobs as a translator of Greek plays by preparing an English version of Aeschylus's “The Suppliant Women.” E. B. Osborn’s “Socrates and His Friend’’ (Hodder) draws attention to the import of the whole of the philosopher's life rather than to that of its closing scenes.

“The Fisherman’s Saint” was the felicitous title selected by Sir William Grenfell for his rectorial address delivered at St. Andrew’s University in November last. He evidently highly appreciated the honour conferred upon him by the ancient Scottish seat of learning almost as much, perhaps, as his Knghthood, conferred by the King for splendid medical work among the people of Labrador. As patron saint of fishermen, of whom Sir William knows so much, St. Andrew would fiaturally appeal to him, and especially as he was addressing students of the venerable foundation bearing the saint’s name. Little authentic information is available about St. Andrew, but of all that [there is Sir William made full use, and with some judicious surmises and assumptions he has eked it out into a helpful, readable, and. in some sort, entertaining life story of one whom he describes as an average, lovable, and impulsive man, one who never knew when he was slighted; a man strong in body and capable in business, of controlled will, a man of sublime faith — perfectly content to be designated as “Simon Peter’s brother ’ just because his ideal was that of his Divine Master. Mr Thurston Hopkins is following his “Kipling Sussex Revisited” with a life of Mr Rudyard Kipling, which Cecil Palmer announces for early publication.