Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 May 1880 — PERSONAL AND LITERARY. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERARY.

Robert Fortune, as English author and botanist, employed in 1887 by the United States to collect ha China seeds of ten shrubs and other plants, is dead; aged sixty-seven year*. The mother of Mr. J. G. Saxe, tbe poet, died recently in Vermont. Although In her ninety-first year, she was a comparatively vigorous woman, her hair not having even turned gray. M. Louis FatRR, the engineer-in-chief who built the St. Gothard tunnel, fell dead in the tunnel on tbe eve' of the completion of the boring. His bust in marble ia to be placed oven the entrance. The “Introduction to the Study of Sign-Language Among the North American Indians/’ by Colonel Garrick Mallery, U. S. A., has just been issued from the Government Printing-Office at Wash* ington. Buckle acquired nineteen languages, among them Maori and Walloon, and wrote and spoke seven with fluency, but, like eo many persons who accomplish such intellectual feats, he only passed Disraeli’s “ fatal 37” by a very few years. Mb. Austin Dobson, the English writer of vert de sodetie, was born in 1840, began to write poetry when he was twenty-five years old, and the first collection of his “Vignettes” was made in 1874. He has been a Government clerk twenty-two years. Princess Elizabeth of Roumania is a literary lady. She is the author of several works, and has also translated several Roumanian poems into English and German. She has just received the medal of merit from the ministers for these literary achievements. Prince Bismarck is more than six feet three inches high, and ia by no means thin. He wears a uniform, and the lapels of his coat, of a bright yellow, overspread his immense chest. He. writes at his desk nearly all night long, and t hoodie sleeps until about noon.

Zola, the popular French novelist, works always in the morning; he cannot write after having tasted food. Personally, he is the ordinary type of a well-to-do tradesman, and only two things strike one while in his society—his lisp, and the extreme smallness, whiteness and delicacy of his hands. Prof. the successful Arctic explorer, has profited by his journey to Japan to buy a collection of valuable Japanese books. These works number 1,036, but as every volume does not contain more than 100 pages, according to the Japanese style, each work comprises many volumes, and the whole collection embraces over 100,000 separate volumes. Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, the novelist, has gone to Niagara Falls, to have her foot on Canadian soil when her new novel, “ Louisiana.” is published in London, so as--to get tbe benefit of the British copyright law. She will stay only so long as this object requires. and, on her return, she proposes to take her first glimpse at New England, staying for a few days with Friends in Springfield. Miss Charlotte Mary Yonge, the author, is now fifty-seven years old. She is a woman devoted to religious work. The profits of her book, the “ Daisy Chain,” amounting to 910,000, she used in building a missionary college at Auckland, New Zealand; while a large portion of those derived from “ The Heir of Redclyffe” went to the equipment of the late Bishop Selwyn's missionary schooner, “The Southern Cross.”