BOOKS AND BÒKS-MEN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume X, Issue 25, 24 June 1893, Page 584

BOOKS AND BÒKS-MEN.

THE Graphic story competition is now closed, and the editor and his assistants will have to begin the somewhat arduous task of reading and judging. The labour has been intensified in many cases by the carelessness, and in others the cussedness of the competitors. Nevertheless, it is very satisfactory to note that the number of stories sent in is far in advance of any previous years. Of the quality it is too early to speak, but in quantity the result of the competition has been all that the promoters could possibly desire. The results will be announced in due course. Mr John Addington Symonds, art critic and historian, is well known to many reading colonials. He died at Davos Platz, and had been but seldom in England during the last fifteen years. He was the son of a well known physician, and was bom at Clifton in 1840. At Oxford he was made a Fellow of Magdalen, and he won the prize essay on a subject, * The

Renaissance,’ on which he was afterwards a frequent writer. His first book was an ‘ Introduction to the Study of Dante.’ Then in 1875 appeared ‘The Age of the Despots,’ which opened his series of works on the Renaissance, that only closed with his ‘ Life of Michael Angelo,’ published last year. His faculty of research was enormous. He read voraciously, and thought deeply on whatever he read. He wrote a good deal of verse, and admirably translated Benvenuo Cellini’s autobiography, and Carlo Gozzi’s memoirs. For the last fifteen years he had spent the greater part of each year at Davos Platz, paying only a short visit to England in the height of snmmer. He first visited Davos Platz broken down in health, and intending, after a brief rest, to pass the winter in a Nile boat. But hjs health improved so remarkably that he stayed where he was, and made his name amid the fir trees. The chief characters in ‘ Constance ’ (Ward and Downey) are a reprobate peer, a consolable widow, a blameless attache, and a pretty governess, who in a previous existence used to sing amusing but indecorous lyrics at the ‘ Ambassadeurs,’ in the Champs Elysees. Lord Hardstock is desperately anxious to marry the widow, but finds it convenient to maintain friendly relations with her governess. This young lady. Miss Emily Biillie, formerly known as Mdlle. de Fanu, hopes herself to become Lady Hardstock. Meanwhile, however, she is quite willing to spend an occasional evening with his lordship at his rooms in the Albany ; and if the book were illustrated we should doubtless have a picture of her there, ‘curled up on a couch with a cigarette between her lips,’ an 1 laughing over the fiction that had enabled her to become an inmate of Mrs Armitage’s highly respectable house.

We are afraid the moralists will be shocked ; but there is no use in disguising the fact that the easy-going Emily is more amusing than the sedate Mrs Armitage, who gives her name to the book. Nor is Miss Emily the only lady in the story whose conduct leaves much to be desired. Mrs Armitage’s sister-in-law, Daphne, roundly declines to be guided in her choice of friends by a husband, and is even ready to pick them np in the Burlington Arcade. Her rashness very nearly leads to disaster, for she is begniled into what seems at first to be an elopement with a young Frenchman.

It is Mrs Armitage who gets her out of the scrape ; but as the widow rushes off to France rather suddenly, and is escorted to the station by Lord Hardstock, she herself is suspected of elopement ; which is the more awkward as the attache had hoped that same evening to obtain her promise to accept his hand. These are only a few of the thrilling complications of which the plot is woven. A doctor who practises mesmerism on the governess also has a good deal to do with it. He puts her to sleep in his consulting room and cannot wake her np again ; and when she is discovered next morning by the doctor’s maiden sister, there is an edifying exhibition of outraged propriety. On the whole it may be said that even Mr Phillips has never written a livelier story, and this may be taken as a guarantee of undoubted vivacity.