Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/105

ns.viiLAuG.2,i9i3.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

99 Covent Garden has in more recent years been associated with the publishing trade. The Macmillans, now removed to St. Martin Street, had for years premises extending from the churchyard to Bedford Street. Chapman & Hall are in Henrietta Street, where they settled on leaving Piccadilly, and have for their neighbours Williams & Norgate, Lovell Reeve, the Duckworths, and Gay & Hancock; in Bedford Street are the Warnes, the Dents, and the Putnams; and in King Street is Eveleigh Nash.

In reference to the trade in the Market Mr. Jacobs gives interesting particulars, the result of his own experience. He tells us that "the time to see Covent Garden at its busiest is on a summer morning between five and six o'clock, when the vans of the fruiterers and greengrocers are arranged in the middle of the streets sur- rounding the Market, and the Market is crowded by a heterogeneous collection of humanity. Among these may be found nuns in their sombre garments, whilst a few sweet-faced nurses in uniform, with bunches of flowers under their arms wherewith to refresh the wards in the great hospitals, add a splash of colour to the animated scene." "The varieties of fruit are to-day so plentiful that it is somewhat difficult to say which enjoys the greatest amount of popularity." The orange is consumed in ever-increasing quantities, and the province of Valencia alone annually exports 4,000,000 cases to the United Kingdom. Apples also are eaten in exceptionally large quantities in this country, and the crop grown in Australia and Tasmania "has increased to a remarkable degree within the last few years." "The Flower Market extends from Wellington Street as far back as the 'Jubilee' Market, partly over which is a new market for the sale of French flowers." The shops in Tavistock and York Streets are almost all occupied by flower salesmen.

We cannot close this notice without mentioning that Covent Garden has always been noted as one of the healthiest parishes in the kingdom, and during the cholera epidemic in 1849 not a single case appeared, though in neighbouring parishes the mortality was great; and the same may be said of more recent visitations.

July Quarterly Review brings together for its readers' delectation an unusually good bunch of subjects. The writers of 'Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.' have found a highly appreciative exponent in Mr. C. L. Graves, who leads up to their achievements in a concise but discriminating account of the antecedent Anglo-Irish humorous novel. Mr. W. L. Courtney, to whose views on the drama we have recently been attending in The Fortnightly, discusses here 'Dramatic Construction and the Need for a New Technique.' His paper is laboured, and goes somewhat slowly over ground already thrice familiar, only to reach at last the conclusion that what we want is "not so much a brand-new technique—that is impossible," as a suitable modification of the old. Still, the patient reader may find his reward in many a good thing thrown out by the way. Mr. John Bailey's article on Mr. Robert Bridges's poetry, written before the decision as to the Laureateship, but anticipating it, is a sober and interesting piece of criticism, in which we are disposed only to quarrel a little with the choice of the illustrations, which seem to show too exclusively that side of Mr. Bridges's poetry which most closely neighbours prose. Another poet, now much in the public eye, is dealt with in Prof. S. G. Dunn's 'A Modern Bengali Mystic: Rabindranath Tagore,' of which the opposite may perhaps be said, that its principal happiness lies in its choice of examples from the 'Gitànjali.' Lord Cromer and Mr. Bernard Holland give us an attractive and discriminating portrait of Sir Alfred Lyall. A kindred piece of work, which struck us as singularly arresting and penetrating, is the sketch of the late George Wyndham, by W. W. 'Modern Feminism and Sex-Antagonism' is a subject which we have frequently observed soon gets a writer, as it were, out of breath. Miss Ethel Colquhoun in her treatment of it here is no exception; while agreeing with many of her statements we confess ourselves unable to discover what she is driving at. Miss Elizabeth S. Haldane's 'Life of Descartes' is a very able and interesting résumé of M. Charles Adam's recent monumental work, and embodies some of the new matter published by him. Mr. Charles Singer has an illustrated article on 'The Early History of Tobacco,' drawn in great part from the work of the little-known French geographer Thevet, whose 'Singularite de la France Antarctique' was published in 1558, and full of curious information. Mr. Whetham has already often ere this "signalized," as Gibbon would say, his gift for exposition, and his fine and erudite statement of the scientific history and present position of the atomic theory is not less good than we should have expected. 'Dry-Fly Fishing for Sea Trout' is a charming and lively little treatise, full of detail alike as to business, scenery, and incident, on a somewhat new form of sport, which, in the writer's opinion, has a future. The articles dealing with modern questions are on 'London University Reform,' 'The Marconi Affair,' and 'Eastern Problems and British Interests.'

The Fortnightly Review for August opens with Lord Grey's appeal to the British public to acquire the two and half acres west of the Strand, known as the Aldwych Island Site, for the erection of a worthy Dominion House. The urgent reasons for taking this step are weightily set forth, and we can but express our hope that they may lead to prompt action in a matter all too long neglected. In 'Great Britain's Poverty and its Causes' Mr. J. Ellis Barker sets out part of the new statistics which give the results of the first Census of Production. These should be carefully studied by our social reformers, for they expose a root of our economic troubles which has been largely overlooked. Mr. Frederick Lawton's study of 'Emile Antoine Bourdelle' is, perhaps, the most interesting of the non-political articles; he emphasizes Bourdelle's superiority to his contemporaries—even to Rodin—in power of imagination, and the bracing quality his work derives from this. A good contribution to the detail of Shakespearian scholarship and history is Mr. Frederick S. Boas's paper on 'Hamlet' at Oxford, where extracts, hitherto unpublished, from the Oxford city accounts help to illustrate the diverse attitude towards companies of players of the city and the university. Mr. Rowland Grey's 'Boys