Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/306

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NOTES AND QUERIES. 112 s. L APRIL s. me.

task seems likely enough in the light of the fact that it was he to whom Tresham turned, when

-on his death-bed, to write a letter to Salisbury, which he had painfully at heart, retracting an accusation made against the Jesuit, Father Garnet. It is rather a pity this interesting monograph is not better written, and put together with more

-care as to clearness and arrangement.

It is a melancholy, but great and proud pleasure "to read the stately tribute of so famous a poet as

M. Simile Verhaeren to Rupert Brooke, which forms -.the first item of this month's Fortnightly. These

verses surround the young poet's name with the simple, magical beauty of the scenes in which he

died, and of his burial. Mr. Wilfrid L. Randell ^discusses the art of Henry James, and, having an

obvious familiarity with it, is also rather obviously infected by it. Henry James is, perhaps, one of

-those few writers who need no expounding to -those readers who have a taste for them, and who cannot be expounded to those without that taste. JStill, we recognize that a certain number of pages ,on this topic are due to itself by every review '.that counts. Mr. W. H. Mallock gives us the first instalment of a study of ' Democracy and Industrial Efficiency,' and Mr. Edwin Pugh con- tributes some academic considerations called ' The Cowardice of Warfare,' the point of which is not as clear as it might be. ' The Parliamentary Bar and What it Does,' by Mr. J. H. Balfour Browne, is an entertaining and informing paper upon a subject to which probably few readers have -given much attention, and is, therefore, unusually '.fresh and welcome. We may also mention Mr. James Milne's ' The Spirit of France,' and * The 'Teachings of the Napoleonic War ' (again a first "instalment), by Politicus. Mr. Robert Crozier Long's paper on ' What's Wrong with the War ? ' '..is the most impressive of the articles which deal "immediately with the European crisis .j 3f jffij^jsgaaii

The* Nineteenth Century forjApril has a long article on Shakespeare from the pen of Mr. S. P. B. Mais under the somewhat cryptic title, ' Our

'Greatest Privilege and our Greatest Achieve- ment.' It contains several good notions, several " superior " criticisms and expressions of admira- tion, a fairly thorough discussion of Shakespeare's personal characteristics and limitations as inferred from the plays, and apt quotations from previous studies on this inexhaustible theme. A clever piece of work, it must be confessed that it, never- theless, hardly satisfies. Rowland Grey's study

-of ' Charlotte Bronte and Belgium ' naturally turns chiefly on ' Villette ' and the recently pub- lished letters to Constantin Heger. It is curious that, in commenting on the characters in ' Vil- lette,' Pauline is not mentioned. Dr. Hagberg Wright contributes an article of unusual interest in a translation the first into English verse of a Russian byliny, or lay from a folk-epic, with a page or two of explanatory introduction. The

-earliest collection of these lays, he tells us, was made in 1619 by an Englishman, Chaplain to the British Embassy at Moscow, and is now in MS. in the Bodleian. Prof. J. H. Morgan once more

describes what he has seen and heard at the front this time ' With the French Armies ' ; and very vivid, instructive, and moving are the things he has to tell. Sir Harry Johnston has a paper on ' Kilimanjaro,' the scope of which is

. geographical and historical as well as immediately

political. The rest of the number is taken up with the problems of the day Bishop Bury's article ' Concerning Prisoners of War ' being, perhaps, the one which is likely to be of most use to the future historian.

THE editor of The Cornhill is to be congratulated upon the April number. It is full of good things. Of the ten items three are character sketches, and the trio Catherine Gladstone, * Festus ' Bailey, and Henry James is in itself a curious one to contemplate. Mrs. Gladstone's vivid and joyous personality is well set before the reader by her daughter's pen ; and so is the abounding family life of which, in her earlier womanhood, she was the mainspring. Mr. Edmund Gosse's study of ' Festus ' and its author is an essay worth noting for reference. Everybody who reads must know at least something about 'Festus,' but few can be expected to read the work itself ; Mr. Gosse's estimate of it and his account of Bailey are exactly what the general reader of the present day re- quires on the subject. Mr. Arthur C. Benson's ' Henry James' is a very characteristic performance, and as such may provoke a smile ; but his limpid egoism serves in this case effectively to focus an attractive portrait. We much enjoyed Judge Parry's ' The Passing of the Indictment,' one of his best pieces. Mr. Boyd Cable in ' A Night Patrol * is well up to his average, and how good that is readers of The Cornhill already know. There is, however, one paper to which we would draw special attention the account by a Rhodesian Rifleman of his share in the great war. Many of the details are unexpected and instructive, as when the writer tells us that his nerves, shattered by his terrible adven- tures as one of a scouting party, were restored by a blow in the back from the case of a shell ; but, apart from these, it is one of the strongest and most touching narratives of a soldier's own experi- ences that we have seen, and given, too, with admirable simplicity, rapidity, and energy, as well as with an unusual and delightfully unliterary skill Our readers are not likely to overlook the curious notes, put together with comments, in the Arch- deacon of Northampton's ' Aubrey and Shake- speare '; nor yet to miss 'Chloroform: a Poem,' by Mr. Greville V. T. Gooke. This last is not easy to criticize as to its verisimilitude, which seems to us a little doubtful on the score of its divers abstract conceptions ; as poetry it is chiefly remark- able for three or four poignant lines phrases rather set here and there in the midst of the abstract aforesaid.

The Athenceum now appearing monthly, arrange- ments have been made whereby advertisements of posts vacant and wanted, which it is desired to publish weekly, may appear in the intervening weeks in ' N. & Q.'

10 <ff0rasp0tt&arts,

L. L. K. and DR. WILLCOCK. Forwarded.

'ON THE BANKS OF ALLAN WATER,' ante, p. 168. MR. ARCHIBALD SPARKE quotes from vol. iv. of 'Scots Minstrelsie' a passage stating that the Allan (cf. Strathallan) is a Perthshire tributary of the Forth, and that the air, though because of this usually brought under the Scottish category, is not in reality Scottish.