or small." poverty and depression, Susan informs her stepson, whom she loves and is very kind to, of the ing. severe straits in which she is. The result is that when she comes in after a short absence she discovers the children, all hanged, and swinging from the clothes pegs; the elder boy having first hanged, them and then himself to relieve the parents' hands." The error is only a small one, as the maidservant pleaded in Midshipman Easy; but it must have amused Mr. Hardy, and is of interest to the general reader as showing the superficial manner in which the severest critics sometimes read the books they condemn. Her Mention of Mrs. Oliphant's name brings a sad regret with it that she has failed to hold the large reading public which was once hers to inform and delight as few authors have done. A new generation has sprung up which knows her not. Yet in point of style, and thought, and feeling, and versatility, she stands among the very foremost. early book, Margaret Maitland, which was admired by Charlotte Brontë, should be again brought before the public. Only the other day we made an unavailing search for it and found that it had long been out of print. The time has come when justice should be done to this really great writer. Account should be taken in any estimate of her work, of her remarkable preface to Agnes in which she explains her view of fiction. Agnes, though perhaps too long and too painful, is the best of all her books. Nor should it be forgotten that in Innocent she made a new and somewhat venturesome experiment-an experiment which perhaps has not yet had full justice done to it. There is a sentence, by the way, in Mrs. Oliphant's Innocent which embodies the same truth that gave striking force to Ian Maclaren's little story, Afterwards," published in McClure's Magazine a year ago, and which elicited a remarkable paper in the same magazine a few months later from Mrs. PhelpsWard. Mr. Watson's conclusion reads: "For we sin against our dearest, not because we do not love, but because we do not imagine." Mrs. Oliphant observes: "I believe, for my own part, that imagination is the first faculty wanting in those that do harm to their kind, great The coincidence is interest It is somewhat remarkable, and may have passed unnoticed by many readers, that Mrs. Oliphant invented the name "Thrums," and used it in one of her early novels. Mr. Barrie re-invented it in total ignorance of his predecessor's book. The first choice of a fictitious name for Kirriemuir which appeared in his earliest sketches was "Whins." Mr. R. H. Hutton, the editor of the London Spectator, who was the subject of a paper under "Living Critics" in our last issue, is the son of the Rev. Hutton was himself a Unitarian minisDr. Hutton, a Unitarian minister. Mr. ter, but ceased to act as such on his apHall, Gordon Square. There his health pointment as principal of University Hutton to the West Indies, where he broke down, and he went with Mrs. recovered his health, but lost his wife. He came back to England, read for the ing also to the Prospective Review and Bar, and edited the Inquirer, contributother magazines. By and by he joined the Church of England, but did not take orders. Says one who lamented to the Rev. Frederick D. Maurice that given himself to journalism: “I well Hutton had ceased to preach, and had remember the scorn with which Maurice then spoke of the clerical profession as compared to the position Mr. Hutton had taken instead as editor of a very influential journal, and said, 'He is infinitely more influential where he is than he could have been as a clergyman.' A warm and lasting friendship sprang up between Hutton and Maurice. In the Prospective Review Hutton wrote a masterly critique of Maurice's Theological Essays; indeed, he has been par excel lence the interpreter of Maurice to those outside. This was not the only occasion on which Maurice disparaged the ministry. Once being asked whether he considered novels or sermons more useful, the great divine replied, "Novels, certainly," and gave Silas Marner as an example of a book which had “searched him very deeply and taught him not a little." In our last number we disclosed some interesting facts relating to to Charles Dickens's father, the original of Mr. Micawber, and reproduced an illustration of the cottage in Devonshire where the novelist attempted to settle his father in the country, but which failed to have sufficient charms to hold that erratic individual. To a fascinating paper in the February Strand on "Charles Dickens's Manuscripts" we are indebted for the accompanying fac-similes. The receipt signed by " E. Pickwick" is a curiosity, inasmuch as it is the original document from the hand of a celebrated coach proprietor at Bath, from whom or from whose coaches Dickens derived the name of his hero in Pickwick. The title-page of The Pickwick Papers is from an edition published at Philadelphia in 1838, probably pirated, which contains many interesting and clever illustrations by Sam Weller" and "Alfred Crowquill" (A. H. Forrester), subsequently the first illustrator of Punch. A copy of this book, from which this fac-simile is taken, was given by Charles Dickens to John Forster in 1838 or 1839. The titlepage is a delicious apotheosis of the immortal Pickwick. It is significant that while we hear much of an alleged decline in Dickens's reading public, the English publishers claim no falling off in the yearly sales of his works as regards number. Cosmopolis, the new international monthly review, whose establishment we announced some time ago, has begun to appear, the first number having been issued in January. The contributions are some in English, some in French, and some in German, and the list of writers in this one number is a very remarkable one, including Stevenson, Sir Charles Dilke, Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Paul Bourget, Anatole France, George Brandes, Francisque Sarcey, Theodor Mommsen, M. de Pressensé, and Ernst von Wildenbruch--a more impressive collection than ever before wrote for a single number of any magazine. Mr. Gosse defends Jude the Ob scure against the wonderfully unanimous attack that has been made upon it by the critics; but his defence is evidently up-hill work, and affects one with a feeling of oppression. Sir Charles Dilke contributes an interesting account of the origin of the Franco-Prussian War. Professor Mommsen writes of capital punishment in ancient Rome. In the list of present and future contributors, Cosmopolis includes the names of no Americans, unless John Oliver Hobbes and Henry James can be regarded as such-which they cannot. nisms which he finds in Mr. Crane's new play, The Governor of Kentucky. This critic contends that the presentation of the title rôle itself is not true; and after giving in detail the respects in which it WILLIAM H. CRANE. From a photograph by Sarony. is lacking, goes on to say that if Mr. Crane did make a visit to Kentucky in order to take notes, as he is said to have done, then he must have found there some strange and unfamiliar type of the Executive (such as a Republican governor) heretofore unknown. compared with the indictment with which the indignant Kentuckian winds up. Where, demands he, where throughout the length and breadth of God's country-from the mountains to the Blue Grass, from the Pennyrile to the Purchase-were such things as make the special points of this preposterous play ever heard, or thought, or dreamed of? Think for a moment what they are: bottles of whiskey on the supper tables at a ball in the Governor s mansion; two New York young women of Bowery looks and manners among the most honoured guests; an elderly maiden lady of good Kentucky family consorting with horse-jockeys; two men, assumably gentlemen, playing poker for money in the presence of a girl whom they respect! And this is what has been enthusiastically received by Eastern audiences as "a convincing portrayal of Kentucky life and character." La Revue of Paris prints, for the first time, a statement by George Sand on her views of novel-writing and her views of life in general. It was written when she was seventy-one years old, and was meant as a preface to a new edition of her works; but the project of the new edition was given up. Though she was looking forward to death at the time, it expresses only the most cheerful sentiments, for there was a stubbornness about her optimism as about her idealism. Concerning this last she has a good deal to say, of which the substance is this. She has been charged with idealising her personages. Well, she meant them to be as they are. And which is not the same thing-she saw them so, and often met people like them in the world. But if she had only met one such noble personage, that same would have been real, and she would be within her rights in depicting him. She is aware the present temper of the world is hard; she has done her level best to soften the feelings of her contemporaries, and altogether failed. But she means to go on her old way-at seventyone !-and, if she can persuade a single soul of the reality of ideal virtue, will say her time has not been lost. And all will come right. As for the world going to the dogs, or dying of feebleness-not a bit of it. The groaner only echoes his own miserable condition; new force But these hits are trifles light as air is springing up on every side of him. As to the mountaineer's flask, which plays no inconspicuous part, the Kentuckian has also a protest to enter; affirming that no moonshiner was ever known to carry anything more sophisticated than a flat glass bottle with a corncob stopper. So far as the dark red liquor masquerading as moonshine whiskey is concerned, the critic considers that too utterly absurd to be commented upon, since the very babies in Kentucky know that the real thing is as colourless as water. Messrs. Roberts Brothers are about to publish a new novel by Robert Buchanan entitled Effie Hetherington. It is said to be one of the most powerful stories Mr. Buchanan has ever written. The same firm has also in the press a volume of Armenian Poems rendered into English by Miss Alice Stone Blackwell. next four new volumes to be added to the Keynotes Series will be entitled Nobody's Fault, by Netta Syrett; In Homespun, by E. Nesbit; Platonic Affections, by John Smith; and Nets for the Wind, by Una Taylor. The On another page, in connection with Miss Lilian Whiting's article on Mrs. Browning, which contains new material hitherto unpublished concerning the great woman-poet of our era, there will be found an illustration of Mrs. Browning's tomb in the cemetery of Florence. THE MEMORIAL INSTITUTE TO MRS. E. B. BROWNING AT LEDBURY. Italy has also placed a memorial on the Casa Guidi, where she wrote and died, and upon which "grateful Florence" stamped in letters of gold its tribute to her who "with her golden verse linked Italy to England." It will surprise many to learn that no bust or tablet of Mrs. Browning is in Westminster Abbey; no slab is on the house where she lay so long an invalid in London; no outward mark of her memory exists in England. The opportunity is now given to contribute to a memorial in honour of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which it is hoped that all who care for Mrs. Browning in Great Britain and America will participate. A The townsfolk of Ledbury, the Herefordshire town close to where Mrs. Browning lived from her babyhood till she was twenty, resolved a few years ago to raise a memorial in their town which should be worthy of the poet, and which resolution has been warmly approved by many of the leading literary men and women of the day. A site was given and the sum of £1550 has been raised by subscriptions, including the cost (150) of a valuable clock, given by a generous townswoman. handsome stone building, suitable for a free library, with a fine clock tower, designed by Mr. Brightwen Binyon, A.R.I.B.A., is nearly finished; but its cost will be about £2300, so that at least £750 is required to free the memorial from debt. The Institute was opened in January by Mr. Rider Haggard, who paid. a generous tribute to the memory of the great poetess. An earnest appeal is made to all in America who are in sympathy with the movement for help to complete the memorial free from debt. That the memorial is rightly placed in Ledbury none will doubt who remember how Mrs. Browning wrote of the Herefordshire neighbourhood in Aurora Leigh. Subscriptions should be sent to Mr. C. W. Stephens, Hon. Sec., The Cross, Ledbury, or to the National Provincial Bank, Limited, Ledbury, Herefordshire, England. Subscriptions sent to THE BOOKMAN for transmission will be acknowledged in these columns. |