ecessor. It will contain new material about almost every author of the period, mainly from manuscript sources and partly from newspapers and periodicals. It is expected that the work will be published in six volumes, and by the time it is completed it is hoped that it will furnish the most important collection of papers in existence towards a complete literary history of the century. Mr. Thomas J. Wise, author of the Bibliography of John Ruskin, will collaborate with Dr. Nicoll in editing this important undertaking. The first volume will be published before the end of the year by Messrs. Dodd, Mead and Company.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling has after all decided that he will not go to India this autumn. He is at present staying with his father at Tisbury, in Wiltshire, England.

It has been noticed by attentive readers that Mr. Crockett's name always appears on his books and elsewhere as "S. R. Crockett ;" and no sketches of him, so far as we know, have given his name in full. Even in his correspondence Mr. Crockett simply uses his initials. Hence it may be of interest to note about the Covenanter novelist that the letters "S. R." stand for "Samuel Rutherford."

It will be remembered that the admirers of Professor Theodor Mommsen presented him last year with a fund of 25,000 marks ($6250) on the occasion of his Jubiläum, a good portion of this sum having been raised in England and the United States. It is now announced that he has turned the money over to the Berlin Academy of Sciences to defray the cost of preparing a complete corpus of Greek numismatical inscriptions.

Mr. Robert S. Hichens, whose lively satire, The Green Carnation, made such a distinct hit last year, has just issued, through the Messrs. Appleton, another clever performance entitled An Imaginative Man. Mr. Hichens is a young man of thirty, yet he has already crowded a good deal of hard work into this brief span. Although at the age of seventeen he wrote a novel which was actually published, he seems to have been most

meant the artistic reproduction of life literally as it is, or of even a single scene exactly as it occurred, realism is impossible and even unthinkable. Art, in fact, is a process of representing, or attempting to represent a whole, by a very small number of selected parts; and whether the representation is true to life, or in other words, whether it expresses a reality, and is in any deep sense realistic, does not depend only on the accuracy of each part, but on the general impression which the parts, when put together, produce. If M. Zola had witnessed and described the Crucifixion, he would probably have devoted more care to describing a heap of filth at the foot of the Cross, than the aspect and behaviour of the Sufferer; but he would not for that reason be more realistic than the Evangelists, who omit such details altogether."

Whether M. Zola's views be true or false, it is certain that his romances are still in demand. Otherwise we should not read the announcement of an edition of Une Page d'Amour (Les Rougon Macquart) with one hundred illustrations by François Thévenot, forming a handsome octavo volume for twenty-five francs! La Curée has already appeared in the same style and at the same price, and Nana is in preparation to range with these two. Emile Testard is the publisher.

Among all his books, George Moore regards Mike Fletcher as embodying his best work. After finishing it, he wrote to a friend in this country: "At last I have written a really great book. It is the best-all I can do." The novel, however, had little success in England, and none at all in this country. Mr. Moore was in despair, after which he was comforted by the gradual appreciation of his critical work, especially his Impressions and Opinions, and also by the vogue of Esther Waters. It may be whimsical, but we really believe that much of the neglect from which Mike Fletcher suffered was due to its very unattractive title. There is a good deal in a name, as any publisher can testify from his own experience.

Mr. Moore likes Americans, and especially American women, whose clever talk amuses him. He has a number of correspondents in this country to whom he dashes off rapid, unconventional letters, full of blots and blurs, and characterised by an utter disregard for the ac cepted rules of English orthography, for Mr. Moore can never learn to spell, and depends greatly upon the friendly proof-reader-in which, by the way, he is not alone among men of letters. Moore is still unmarried, and resides, when in London, in the Temple, of which famous place he has given several interesting pictures in his novels. As a worker he is indefatigable, rewriting and polishing to the last moment. Upon Esther Waters he spent three years of hard work.

Mr.

"Maarten Maartens" occupies a unique place in English literature. A Hollander, he is known by his neighbours as a country gentleman who shuts

himself up for hours together writing-while he has leapt to fame as a writer of fiction in English. His new novel, My Lady Nobody, is reviewed on another page, and the accompanying portrait is taken from a recent photograph. He has frequently visited London since he became famous, and is now paying a more extended visit to "the English country,' which has a wonderful fascination for this foreigner. "Assuredly," he says, "London resembles a magnet in the way in which it draws men to itself from all parts.

"How did you come to write fiction?" he has been asked by the inevitable interviewer, "especially fiction in English?"

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I had been to England as a boy, and later I travelled a good deal, having a considerable amount of leisure on my hands. It was meant that I should go into politics, but I am thankful I have found my activities in another direction-in literature, that is. True, I am a graduated barrister, but that was really part of my training for public life, and I have never practised. During one holiday, then, I wrote in English my first story, The Sin of Joost Avelingh, and sent it over here to ascertain if any publisher would have it. A bold proceeding, wasn't it?"

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novels. Many people regard them as translations. As a matter of fact, a translation of them into Dutch is only now being made, and I may add that they are also being translated into German."

Well, and did you find a publisher?'' "I hardly expected that I should, and I didn't, but eventually I published the story at my own risk. Everybody thought it was a translation of a Dutch story, and I fancy that a misapprehension to this effect still exists in reference to my

"You preferred, from the artistic point of view, perhaps, to write in English?''

"Yes. Dutch is very fine for higher prose or poetry, but for lighter literature, I think, English is superior. It is more flexible, nimbler; only don't sup

pose, as I saw it stated somewhere, that the Dutch peasants know English. Oh, dear, no; but still the Dutch are very good linguists. My second book, An Old Maid's Love, Bentley published, and with the exception of a short novel, A Question of Taste, he has issued what else I have written. God's Fool is my own favourite, but many people appear to think that The Greater Glory is a better book.

“I endeavour to write stories,” continued Mr. Maartens, "which shall, as closely as I can make them, be reflections of real life. The extent to which I succeed in that is the extent to which I am content with what I write, and the interest the books have created has naturally greatly gratified me. The more I think of it, the more I am amazed at this interest; and it is not in England only that it exists, but also in America. Why should you say that?" "Well, you see the circumstances are so unusual-a Dutchman appealing to English-speaking people. In writing English, too, there is the disadvantage of being unconsciously betrayed into Dutch forms of expression. For the rest, my position stands by itself, of course, and in that alone there is an enormous advantage."

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one hundred leading educators, authors, and journalists agree to adopt the proposed list of spellings, then Messrs. Funk and Wagnalls would at once introduce it into their various publications. Should they secure their hundred victims, we trust that we shall receive a list of their names. By the way, why stop short at the reform of our orthography? English orthography is, of course, very irregular and illogical, but so is the English language. Why does not the able Mr. Marsh, who is the linguistic sponsor of Messrs. Funk and Wagnalls, take this in hand? Just think, for instance, of all the irregular verbs upon which the babes and sucklings are continually stumbling. Why should we continue to say, "I go, went, I have gone," when we could easily simplify matters by making it, "I go, I goed, I have goed"? Why not get a hundred leading educators, authors, and journalists to tackle this far greater and more glorious "refawrm"? Of course, some absurdly scientific person will say that the irregularities of the tongue are a part of its history, and are of the greatest value to the philologist, besides giving force and picturesqueness to the written and spoken language; but, then, this is also true of its irregular orthography. Persons who will persist in spelling and speaking as our ancestors have done, are quite capable of thinking the mountains and valleys of Switzerland (shockingly irregular affairs!) more beautiful than a nice, regular Kansas prairie. Why should any one consider their opinions? On with the "refawrm !"

Some one should start a school for the instruction of authors and editors in the proper use of the auxiliaries "shall" and "will," for the knowledge of the distinction between them seems to be vanishing from the American people. Among authors, Mr. Richard Harding Davis is the worst offender in this respect, and we wonder that his sojourn at the Lehigh and Johns Hopkins Universities failed to effect a reform. A very bad instance was also lately seen in the letter addressed to the English public by the Cornell University Crew -a letter in which the misused "wills" gave a finishing touch to the lamentable story of the Henley race.

It must be admitted that the Cornell men suffered chiefly there for the sins of others-first, the blatant Courtney, who put heart into his crew by assuring them and every one else that they had not the ghost of a chance to win; second, the absurd person named Francis, who made a spectacle of himself on two memorable occasions; and, third, the English umpire, whom they innocently supposed to be a person set in authority over them, as is an umpire in this country. Incidentally the world had a chance to see displayed once more the delicate courtesy which Englishmen bestow upon defeated rivals, in the hooting and hissing with which the Cornell men were received at the finish of their race with Trinity Hall. English fair-play is a precious and proverbial thing, but it is evidently, like many other precious things, so limited in quantity as to be kept wholly for English use, and never by any chance wasted upon the pernicious foreigner. Thus when the America first won the famous cup, the English generously insinuated that she had won by concealed machinery; and last year, when Mr. Gould's Vigilant lost her centreboard, the English press intimated that the accident had been carefully arranged.

Messrs. Longmans, Green and Company will publish Mr. Stanley Weyman's new romance, The Red Cockade, on the first of December.

It has been extensively rumoured that Mr. Hall Caine's new novel goes on a royalty of two shillings a copy into the hands of a publishing firm into which fresh energy has been lately infused. We understand that this is not the case, and that Mr. Hall Caine's next book will be published by his present English publisher, Mr. Heinemann.

Professor Edward Dowden, whose notable book, New Studies in Literature has just been published by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, was born in 1843. He was educated at Queen's College, Cork, and Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Vice-Chancellor's prizes for English verse and prose, and became first senior Moderator in Logic and Ethics, and finally Professor of English Literature. He is