GENERAL NEWS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 216, 15 June 1877, Page 17

GENERAL NEWS.

Ireland's national anniversary was celebrated in a befitting manner in the great capital of France. A dinner at Vefour's^ gotten up by gentlemen of Irish descent, took place. Judge Connolly, of the Court of Cassation, presided. There were present quite a number of notabilities, including Colonel O Brien, Colonel M'Dertnott, the composer O'Kelly, Count Nugent, Viscount O' N eill de Tyrone and his sons, Dr. O'Loughlin, Mr. John O Leary, Professor J. P. Leonard and his son — in all twenty-seven. O Connell looked down on the company from an elegant encadr^ment of gold and greenery. The bust of Marshal M.icMahon held as of right the place of honor, for of all the anciens Jrlandalt certainly he is the man who makes the greatest figure in the Europe of the day. Then there were portraits of other distinguished Irishmen — orators and men of the sword and pen. But the most curious feature of the whole festival consisted of the personality of anciens Irlandais, French in speech, in manners, in habits of thought — in the very cut of their beards — they showed their Irish origin in their faces as clearly as Marshal MatiMahon does, or Marshal O'Donneli did. A very jolly symposium was that which kept Vefour's cooks busy on the 17th of March, 1877.

The Germania, on the occasion of the eighty-first birthday of the Emperor William, says : — " In a room where the bailiff is about to tear down the gilded curtain rods, no one thinks of drawing the cork of a bottle of champagne. The echo would be a melancholy sound, and no one could quaff his cup with joy. Our country is just in this state, for its inhabitants are driven by misery ia crowds to the pawnbroker's, so that they may have the fii*st necessaries of life. The Kulturkampf has changed into a gloomy desert quarters that were the most flourishing, intelligent and fair of our country, without which Brandenburg-Prussia would long since have been suffocated in the marshes of the old March and drowned in the marshes of the new. Were we then to make festival for this anniversary, we should be mere impostors and hypocrites. This we do not want to be. So we wait for better times."

M. Legros, the etcher, has made a sensation in England. The Athenctum says of his new portrait of Cardinal Manning, that. " had Titian or, above all, Tintoretto, painted such a head, and given so much vigor of character to his transcript, we should have hailed the type a3 historical, one which ia that time and in life was portentous."

The Daily News has been informed from Rome, that the Bible Society at Philadelphia have been forced by financial reasons to recall from Rome their missionary, Mr. Van Meter, who leaves the schools he has established in charge of a Wesleyan and a Baptist missionary, both from America. It is clear then that the Americans have at last become aware that they are only throwing money to the winds in their efforts to rob the poor Romans of their faith. In view of the recent movement for the preservation of the Irish language, the Rev. P. O'Leary, Rathcormack, Cork, writes as follows : " I have access to MSS. which contain a large stock of Munster lyrical poetry, ranging as to dates over the last two centuries. Some of these lyrics I have Been in print, with English versions annexed. As a. general rule these versions, especially the poetical ones, are frightful caricatures of the originals. lam convinced that a great part of the prejudice which outsiders feel against our language has been produced by the Bight of these caricatures."