Untitled

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6140, 29 March 1898, Page 1

Many readers will resociai. hours member with delight the with late Mrs "W. P. Byrne's celebrities. " Gossip of the Century." A continuation of that book of sketches has lately been published, containing many interesting and amusing reminiscences of European celebrities. Mrs Byrne was a great traveller, and in Pesth ' she made the acquaintance of the distinguished Magyar scholar and patriot, Professor Eonay, Secretary to the National Academy, who, at the time of the collapse of the Hungarian rebellion of 1848-9, contrived to escape from his prison under romantic circumstances, and found a refuge in England. The famous Cobden heard him one day asking for work in a London shop, and struck with the poor fellow's worn and wasted appearance, coupled with his gentlemanly bearing, which spoke a language not to be mistaken, he questioned and elicited from him the story of his degradation and flight. Cobden engaged the penniless scholar as art tutor for his son, and the little aid thus rendered enabled Eonay to start once more on an honourable if laborious career. Many and curious are the stories that appear in Mrs Byrne's second volume, and striking were the vicissitudes of fortune that fell to the lot of some of the characters. In one passage Mrs Byrne relates a meeting with a noble lady in curious circumstances. " When in Paris in the year 1857 with a friend," she says, " we met a singular-looking group, consisting of a little elderly woman in a very tattered costume, accompanied by a girl aud boy also in tatters j it was the Quartier de la Chiffe, and these were of its inhabitants. 1 saw my friend scanning them attentively. ' There,' said he, *is an illustration of the vicissitudes of fortune which occur in this country ; that is a family of the class peculiar to France, Us pauvres lionUux. That miserable rag-picker is no other than Madame de Martignac, and her husband was brother to the Minister of Charles X.' " In 1840, in Brussels, Mrs. Byrne met the Irish novelist, Charles Lever, then trying to make his way in the medical profession, a veritable mnlicin malgre lvi. Another of her friends was Charles Waterton, the traveller and naturalist who made his estate a home for every kind of wild beast and bird, building nests and burrows for them, and studying their lives at leisure under these novel conditions. The whole book is interesting and amusing, and is instructive, too, while it "helps waste a sullen day."