People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 17 December 1908, Page 28

People We Hear About

Mr. Joseph I. C. Clarke, the author of ' Kelly andBurke and Shea,' is a journalist and poet, and a prominent Irish-American, so prominent that two. years ago he was president of the Friendly Sons of jst. Patrick, a society which includes the most eminent Irish-Americans of every creed. M. Paul Bourget, the novelist, once described the late Cardinal Mathieu as ' a very holy and a very good man with the large bronze face of a peasant, the gaiety of a child, the erudition of a profound savant, and the simplicity of a true apostle.' Father Robert Hugh Benson, M.A., is the fourth son of the Anglican Archbishop Benson of Canterbury. He was educated at ' Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his aegree, and he held several Anglican curacies in East London, etc. In 1903 he was received into the Church at Woodchester Priory, and was ordained in Rome in the following year. Father Benson is a distinguished litterateur, and, has written several works which have had a large circulation. He is at present stationed in Cambridge. > The late Dr. Watson, better known" und*er his pen-name of lan Maclaren, had much sympathy with Catholics and things Catholic. That he should have had this sympathy ■will surprise nobody who reads the biography just published ?>y Dr. Robertson Nicoll. Dr. Nicoll states that his ancestry on the mother's side was Catholic, his grand-uncle heing a well-known and influential Catholic priest in the Highland's. He also that some of Dr. Watson's closest and most appreciated friends were Catholic priests. The Empress Eugenic was recently asked by the Glasgow Dumfriesshire Society, in view of the" fact that lier mother was one of the Kirkpatricks of Closeburn, in Scotland, to allow her name to be enrolled among its patrons. She has now replied, through her secretary, M- Pietri, that she ' regrets tnat, as she has for a long time past declined to allow her name to appear on any public list of associations or of patronage, she is unable to depart in this case from the rule which she has imposed upon herself. But, being desirous to prove to you the interest which she takes in your society — a society to which she is united by the most ancient family ties — she commissions me to send you the cheque (for £5) which you will find enclosed.' Lord Braye, who, our Home exchanges state, is to bring forward in the House of Lords the question of the revision of the Accession Oath, is a convert to the Catholic Faith, having been received in 1870. He is only the fifth holder of a peerage created by Henry VIII. so long ago as 1529. On the death of the second Lord Braye — he was master of the ordnance in Mary's reign, and died of his 'wounds in battle in 1557 — his estates devolved on his three sisters, and the Barony of Braye fell into abeyance until 1839. In 1862 the barony again fell into abeyance, until in 1879 it was determined by the title . devolving on the mother of the present peer. The celebration of the silver jubilee of the marriage of Sir Joseph and Lady Ward and the marriage of their son, Mr. Cyril Ward, on the same date, remind us that the Right Hon. the Premier of this Dominion is now in his 51st year, having' been born in Victoria in 1857. He came to New Zealand at a very early age' with his parents, and after the usual school course set out to make his way in the world. '- Before he reached the age of twenty-one he had started in business on his own •account. Then he began to take an interest in local affairs, from which he passed on to national politics, entering the House of Representatives in 1887. Later on he became a Minister in Mr. Seddon's Cabinet, since which time his public career is ;well known. . ."">'• Miss - Louise Imogen Guiney, a convert to the Catholic "Faith and the only child of General Guiney, may now (says the Westminster Gazette) be regarded as America's greatest woman poet. She has been a resident of .Oxford for the last seven years. ' Songs of the Start,' Miss Guiney's first book, was issued a quarter of a century ago, and nearly a dozen volumes were published in the United States. Besides original and editorial .work— including -monograms on Robert Emmet and Hurrell JVroude, and selected poems of J.C. Mangan, Matthew Arnold^ and- "others— Miss Guiney has since 1901 been pursuing .her , study' of poetry of the seventeenth . century, and particularly In, connection ■with the definite edition of", the poems of Henry Vaughan, ' which she has for long had in, preparation. Miss Guiney was born at Boston, "U.S.A., in 1861.