LITERARY NOTES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5699, 19 October 1896, Page 2

LITERARY NOTES.

[Correspondent " Canterbury Times."] LONDON, August 21. One of the best novels of last autumn was Mr Maclaren Cobban's " Kino- o f Andaman," and why it failed to catch on I do not understand. He is now engaged in a romance of Scotch' history, in which the famous Marquis of Montrpse will figure as hero. . Visitors from the planet Mars will be the heroes of both Dv Manner's "The Martian " and Mr Wells's new serial for Pearson's. Da Maurier's story commences in the October Harper's. Sir Walter Besant's " City of Refuge," which has been running through the Pall Mall Gazette, is to be issued by Chatto's on Oct. 1. "Much has been written within the last few days of the debt which the late laureate owed to the gracious and beautiful wife who the other day passed away, " A Mere Outsider," in the Speaker, says the poet once told him that he had written no letters since his marriage. Lady Tennyson had relieved him of that burden of the life of a famous man. He adds : — " I have had access to one of the very few existing collections of Tennyson's letters, and it was curious to see how after his marriage, ho ceased to write at length to his friends and contented' himself with brief notes merely. His wife had become the family correspondent. It was once niy privilege to hear Mr Gladstone talking to Tennyson. 'Tennyson/ he said, 'has always been absorbed in his own work, and has never allowed himself to be drawn aside from it by anything outside, and it is a good thing for us and the world that he has stuck to this rule through life.' It was the poet's wife who made it possible for him thus to remain absorbed in his own thoughts and his own work. I also extract the following passage from a beautiful account of the late Lady Tennyson, which is contributed to the Athensewn by Theodore Watts-Dunton •. — "As an instance of her power of selecting really luminous points for preservation in her diary let me instance this. Many a student of the ' Idylls of the King' has been struck by a certain difference in the style between ' The Company of Arthur' and the 'Passing of Arthnr' and other idylls. Indeed, more than once this difference has been cited as showing Tennyson's inability to fuse the different portions of a long poem. This fact had not escaped the eye of the loving wife and critic, and two days before her death she said to her son that ' The Coming of Arthur ' and • The Passing of Arthur ' are purposely simpler in style than the other idylls as dealing with the awfulness of birth and death, and wished this remark of the poet's to be put on record in the book." The secret of few pseudonyms has been better kept than that of the author of "The Sowers." For months people in literary circles have asked, "Who is Henry Seton Merriman and where can one meet him?" Even the bestinformed flaneurs of the Authors' Club were at sea on the point. Mr James Payn could, of course, have told, and the editor of the National Observer, but they would not. Ultimately an impostor in the north led Mr " Merriman " to declare himself. Curioxisly enough, he turns out to be quite well known in underwriting circles in the city, holding an excellent appointment at Lloyd's. His name is Scott, and none of his friends had heard of his success or identified him in any way with the most successful of rising novelists. He has, however, it will be remembered, effectively utilised his underwriting experiences in " The Grey Lady." Mr Merriman, like Mr Pett Ridge, prefers literature as a relaxa- 1 tion rather than a profession. One of the Soudan correspondents avers that amongst the most familiar strains to be heard every evening along the tent and "tnkui" lined banks of the Nile is that of the expedition song, "On the Way to Dongolay." As other versions of this parody of Rudyard Kipling's "Mandalay" have already appeared which do not exactly represent the original, it may not be out of pltico to reproduce what will become one of the historical ditties of the Egyptian Army Avhen it is completed, though there are, evidently, many verses yet to be written. The true and authentic libretto is as follows : — I. In a litHe town .-sailed "London, Fur away, and o'er the sea, There's my own best girl a' waiting, And I know she waits for 1110. How I'd like to spend an evening In the same old cheery way, But there ain't no songs nor suppers On the road to Dongolay. On the road to Dongolay, Where the ancient, railway lay, How they toiled, and moiled and sweated, Just to wake one mile a day. Chorus. On the road to Dongolay, Where the dying camels lay, And the sun struck down like hell-fire .and grew hotter day hy day. 11. Shife mo somewhere smith of Sarrass, Were the medal roll begins, And there nin't no wine nor women, And a man wipes out his sins. I begin to think it's gospel What I've often heard them say, Tliiit when oufce you taste Mile water Yon won't never go away. On the ror.tl, &c, and chorus. " Jhe Failure of Sibyl Fletcher," Adelino Sergeant's last novel just issued in single volumo form by Keinemann, is a simple love story of absolutely conventional pattern which is yet told with sufficient literary adroitness to be readable. In tho opening chapters we learn how the heroine —an ovex % -worked artist — is jilted by a detestable combination of prig and coxcomb, and how she flies to the country to hide her shame and her complexion. In a Derbyshire village, far from the maddening crowd, Miss Sibyl meets a rough and rude and virile person. (Rochester of "Jane Eyre" rehashed), who forces her into promising to marry him. She eventually does so, and after tho old lover turns tip (quite according to Cocker) to make the new one jealous, they live happily ever after.