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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21126, 27 August 1938, Page 12

Mrs Belloc Lowndes has her own way of writing a murder story. She is not content to make a mere skeleton

mystery out of clues. She is intent on making her characters alive and plausible; she gives pains to their psychological development. Her latest, "Motive” (Hutchinson) is in her customary, well-known manner. The jumping off place of the mystery is conventional. A millionaire, Sir Thomas Clarkson, is found shot in the study of his country house. The puzzle for the reader is well sustained, but the interest lies chiefly in the group of persons any one of whom may be guilty. Character as much as incident holds the attention and it is more difficult to put down “Motive” unfinished than a number of other detective novels by authors of a more conventional school.

The original letters of John Donne, the Elizabethan poet, relating to his secret marriage to Ann More, were among many rare items included in an exhibition of rare books and manuscripts which was opened in London recently. Donne, at this time aged 26, was secretary to the Lord Keeper, at whose house he made the acquaintance of Ami More. The couple contracted a clandestine marriage, as a result of which Donne lost his post and was imprisoned for a time. The letters are of extraordinary interest, written at the most critical as well as the most romantic period in the life of the poet. The collection is rounded off by an epitaph in Donne’s hand upon his young wife, who died some 16 years later, In which Donne, after recording in beautiful language the death and the virtues of his wife, concludes “here dies John Donne the thirty-third year of his age.” These letters with, in most cases, Donne's seal intact, have been preserved through the centuries in the famous muniment room at Loseley Park, Surrey (the ancestral home of the family into which Donne married), until purchased from the present representative of that family.

Thomas Hardy's birthplace, an old thatched cottage at one end of the haml.lt of Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, has been sold by Lady Hanbury to Mr P. F. Parsons, who has been the tenant at Bockhampton Farm for 13 years. Lady Hanbury is disposing of her estate in that district. The cottage stands on the edge of Puddletown Heath, the stretch of wild moorland that Hardy callqd “Eddon Heath” in his novels. The eightroomed house with cob wall was built by Hardy's great grandfather. Hardy, the son of a builder, was born there on June 2, 1840, and In it he wrote “Under the Greenwood Tree” and “Far From the Madding Crowd." Many people visit the spot each year, and in 1931 a column of granite, erected outside the cottage by American admirers of the novelist, was unveiled by Professor John Livingston Lowes, of Harvard and Oxford. Hardy did not want the cottage to become the resort of sightseers, and the late Sir Cecil Hanbury once stated: “I was asked by Hardy, shortly before he died, to give him my word that the cottage would, so long as I or my heirs held it, be maintained just as if he were still alive —that is, with an ordinary local labourer living in it in an ordinary labourer's way, paying a few shillings a week, taken no particular notice of by anyone, certainly not by sightseeing tourists.”