Miscellaneous Subjects. THE CENTENARY OF THE LONDON TIMES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6184, 12 March 1888, Page 2

Miscellaneous Subjects. THE CENTENARY OF THE LONDON TIMES.

An event happened one day last week which is worth taking a brief note of, viz., the Times celebrated its one hundredth birthday. Amongst journalists of the Sfcead type (of whom there are far too many at present) .it is the fashionable thing to decry the erstwhile "thunderer of Printing House "square," and pooh-poon its influence. I was doing something of the sort the other day, when an older man (also a journalist) caught me •up thus: "Think for a minute,", he aaid, •'and you -will see you are talking nonsense. Commercially the Times has never been a greater success than it is now. ' Its charges are prodigious, yec its advertisement columns increase in numbers..constantly and Rirriiyß overflow. Send an advertisement in on Monday: it will- notf be published till Thursday, unless by special arrangement at a atiS figure. Editorially, perhaps, the Tinus is not .what it was in John Delans's time, yet it wakes up occasionally (as in the impeachment of the Parnellitee) and then what, a. stir it makes. The Pall Mall Gazette might have said the same things ten times over about the PArnellitisa. without rousing a hundredth pact of tho public feeling the Times did. Abuse 'the thunderer though we may, we most of us frel we can rely upon it in esß'eutiaß ' Caution and strict veracity' are tho editorial watchwords. "What other newspaper is there thai'' can, with a paragraph, damn "a book or shake tb'ie credit of a. public Company?, Jfot ooe. Moreover^ the Times is the one journa^ universally read by the country squirearchy and landed gentry of the United Kingdom. Londoners are apt to forget this. . One seldom sees a penny paper in a small country house. The Times, the Field, and the Queen (for'tHe ladies) are the staple periodical literature." ' . Personally, I don't altogether agree with these views, but I thought them shrewd enough to be worth remembering. THE LONG-PfiOMISED BEACONS- - FIELD BIOGRAPHY : SEVEN YEA.ES* DELAY. Some sensation has been caused in Con* servative coteries by a distinctly acid leader in the Siandard challenging Lord Rowtonwith regard to the long-promised biography of the Eirl of Beaoof-sfiield. Seven years, it ib noted, have rolled by since the great man died, and Lord Bowton undertook the task of arranging his friend and patron's memoirs, yet so far as anyone can ascertain, the work is not even in- an advanced condition. Why ? Can it be— asks Mrs Grundy— that there are eecrete which cannot be divulged,, mysteries that cannot yet be solved, or scandals, the handling of which roust bo remitted (d la G-reviile. memoirs) to a :more distant period. Surely Dot. If Disraeli was for a time a Bohemian and an adventurer, his social life was at least eminently respectable.. Even the Steads of the period heai« tatcil to associate hia name with, social scandal, though they fiaug every other sorts of mud at. him. Ud questionably, Lord Rawton will shortly have to give some account of his stewardship. Since 1881, many of the dead Earl's warmest admirers have followed him to the grave ; indeed, it now begins to look as .if the generation which knew him best was not to have tho pleasure of reading his life. Lord Bowton, his friends declare, has good reasons for thi6 strange dilatoriness. One is said to be the impossibility of publishing the Beacousfield correspondence during the Jingo period (1870 to 1830 j, till thfl Qaeen and Mr Gladstone have departed this life. I doubt, however, if there, is really any difficulty about this. The more probable solution of the delay is that Lord Bowton finds the task he undertook beyond liim t yet hesitates to confess the fact. Before next mail, however, an explanation frsm"~~his lordship himself will pretty certainly have solved the conundrum. ! DEATH OF " OLD CHIP." i The death is announced, at an advanced age, of Mr W. H. Chippendale (7 Old | Chip"), whose clever wife is co well j known in your part of the world. He was i a prominent member of the Haymarket Company for upwards of twenty years, and was associated with all Buckstone's notable successes. He created numerous parts during this period, but the characters in which he excelled !were Sir Peter Teazle and Sir Anthony Absolute. So thoroughly were these two old gentlemen soaked into " Old Chip's " system that when some year 3 back his mind gave way, he became permanently sometimes one and sometimes the other. I saw him last in Sheffield in 1876, playing old English comedy, with hi 3 wife, Mr Howe, fand others. He got through the, "School for Scandal" admirably, but the following night in the "Road to Ruin" memory played him so falee that but for others' help the performance must have broken down. MARIA BASTrN'S SHOCKING SUICIDE. Marie Ba-tin'3 name will not Bound - familiar to your readers, but Bhe was a notable prima donna in her own country (Italy), and believed by the Italians who knew not Adelina Patti or Marie Roze to be the best living representative of Aida. She played this role so often and so successfully that like poor old Mr Chippendale she gcew almost to live the 'part. Then came a terrible misfortune. Just as Mdme. B as kin had been engaged to sing in London, she permanently lost her voice. Having amassed a large fortune, most women would not in her .circumstances have been inconsolable. Unfortunately poor Marie Bastin's heart was broken by the blow, arid her mental balance completely overthrown. Dismissing her servants, she costumed herself as Aida, and then looked herself up in the cellar to die of hunger and cold, as Aida did in the opera. Most women would coon have tired of such a scheme. Madness gave Marie Basfcin the moral courage to persevere, so that when her relatives broke into the cellar on New Year's Eve they found her lying in Aiida'a well-known pose —quite dead. . ■ ■-.