LITERATURE AND ART.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 11284, 29 June 1888, Page 3

LITERATURE AND ART.

A Treatise upon modern printing machinery is announced by Messrs Cnssell and Co. Max O'Rcll's new book will be called " Impressions of America and Americans.'' Messrs Field aud Tue.jwill be the English publishers. The author has contrived to secure copyright in th£ United States. The manuscript of iho life of Mr \V. E. Forster, on whicii Mr \Vcmyss Roid has been engaged ever since Mr Forster's death, is vow iv the hands, of Messrs Chapman and-Hall. It will JillWo volumes, and will. be accompanied by portraits of Mr Forster. and otlier illustrations. •• Professoi>Tohn Nichoi. has iv preparation for publication a new volume of essays on --English literature. ; Tlie chief contents of the book will bo essays entitled " Three .'Quarters of a Century,'' "History and / Literature," aud " War Sony.," and several -. critical papers, comprising studies of Carlyle, Thackeray. Macaulay, Dickens, Sydney Dobell, and Lord Tennyson. Messrs Blackwood are the publishers. Mrs Charles Cowden C'arke has just 1 printed privately auother small volume — I verse this time, aud-oi a personal kind in I the main. It is entitled " Memorial son. nets, etc.," and- contains, naturally, much tender and faithful'allusion to the late Charles Cowden Clarke, his relations with Keats being, as a"matter of course, touched on. Some of the' sonnets are about the author's 'early friend, Leigh Hunt. Mr Edward Emerson, of Concord, onlyson of the late R. W. ■' Emerson, recently read to au invited company at his mother's residence a lengthy paper " On tho Domestic Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson." It has been read to some friends at the house of j his cousin, Dr Emerson, in New York, aud ] it is regarded by some 01 the philosopher's j intimate friends as the linest account yet j given of him. It will probably be printed j for private circulation. Mr Edward Emerson says that when his father was near his end, he pointed to a portrait of Carlyle and said with fervour, "That is my man." . • Messrs William Blackwood and Sons have the following book, in the Press : — A reproduction of the original edition of the famous work, " On the Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms ; and their relations to tlieir own 'natural numbers : with an appendix as to the construction of another and better kind : ;of logarithms," by the author and invent.br,. John Napier ; translated from Latin iilt'o English by Wm. Rae Macdonald. ." Merhoir of the Very RevJohn Tulloch, D.D., Principal of St Mary's College in tho University of St Andrews ; one of Her Majesty's Cliaplains for Scotland," by Mrs Oliphant. It is, not generally -known - -that—Luke Sharp is the only recognised American humourist, who is a British subject. Mr Robert Barr, for such is his real name, was ,„b_orii in Glasgow, and, as he says in au 'account of 'J-uns-lf.pDhUshed-in America, "at the mature age of four years, I concluded that this country was not the place for a young man, so I emigrated to Canada taking my parents with me. It was a serious step for so young a person, with a couple of parents on his hands, to take ; but you will get from that fact an inkling of my determined character." Mr Barr still lives under 'lhe'Unio'_f?S_lf,l3a"ving-a-siHenaitlTEslWemse7 surrounded by acres of ground, 011 the Canadian bank of the Detroit River. He is one of the fortunate American humourists who has made his " pile " out of writing. Popular taste, although by no means always correct, has not erred in its genuine appreciation of Mr Fergus W. Home's Australian novel, " The Mystery of a Hansom Cab," recently re-published in England. It has met with a prodigious sale, so sudden and so extensive as to be quite unexampled of lijte years, not forgetting the great success which attended the publication of Hugh Conway's "Called Back." The -wellconceived plot is worked out with nn inge nuity and interest so absorbing that it is impossible to read one page without reading the book to its end. Such elements ot originality as the tale contains— the dramatic force, and intense human interest of the story, the ingenuity of tho plot, the simplicity and straightforwardness of the di_tion — are such that we are not surprised to hear that the demand for it is so eager that printer and publisher are unable to fully satisfy the craving of the public for the new sensational and realistic novel of Melbourne social life.