Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 August 1895 — LITERARY LITTLEBITS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

LITERARY LITTLEBITS

Few people who know Besant believe that he can be 57 years old. His plump face and clear complexion, and his very thick and very brown hair and beard, make him look a much younger man. M. Sardou has written a novel, taking his play “Thermidor” for a theme. And now the author fears to publish It, feeling doubtful concerning the reception of this first effort in the writing of tales. s Lord Rosebery’s mother the Duchess of Cleveland, it writing the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, her aunt, who began life as the, private secretary and confidant of William Pitt, and for thirty years had her own exact way as an Arab sheikh in Syria. A volume of political sketches Is to be published under the title of “Southern Statesmen of the Old Regime.” The author is Professor W. P. Trent, the Southerner who wrote the biography of William Gilmore Simms, published in the Ajneripan Men of Letters Series. “What with the newspapers and the newspaper syndicates offering prizes varying from ten thousand to five hundred dollars,” exclaims the Critic, “that author will be particularly unlucky who does not find his income for 1895 materially much larger than it was in 1894.” The first three volumes of an immense Italian work dealing exhaustively with the voyages of Christopher Columbus are nearly ready for publication. It Is to be complete in fourteen volumes, and the Italian government is bearing the expense of bringing it out. In the third volume are to be found one hundred and seventy facsimile pin tea of autograph writings, both authentic and doubtful. The author of an article in the Independent quotes Mr. Ruskin as declaring that if he had followed the true bent of his mind he should have been a civil engineer. “L should have found more pleasure,” he added, “in planning bridges and sea breakwaters than in praising modem painters.” And with a sigh, he said, “Whether literature and art have been helped by me I know not, but this I do know, that England ]ias lost in me a second Telford.” Rider Haggard says that there is too much talk about a successful author—what he makes or does not make by his pen. He asks, mournfully: “Why can’t authors and their earnings be left alone? Many men make their incomes on the stock exchange and at the bar without being purused by paragraphers. Why should a man who makes his living by his pen be pursued by paragraphs? I believe people often inake more money by paragraphs than the authors about whom they write.”