... London, 28th February, igoo. It is somewhat interesting to note Mr. Lang's pathetic appeal for security of tenure for writers in the latest issue of Longman's Magazine. There is very little meaning in the complaint. Were things any better with the author or the journalist in the days when remunera tion was one-tenth what it now is? If it be true that certain journals attach importance to youth ...

... London, March 14th, 1900. Although it is true that there has been some curtailment of book sales owing to the war, none the less people are at the moment reading novels with consider able avidity. A Double Thread, by Miss Fowler, and Red Pottage, by Miss Cholmondeley, still apparently take the highest places in point of popularity with many of the London booksellers, but there are a number of ...

... London, March 21st, igoo. ^s I write Ireland is very much before the English public, and Irish literature shows no hesitation in asserting itself. Here are three indications of the fact A Book of Irish Verse, selected from Modern Writers Bv W. B. Yeats. Second edition. Methuen Journal of the National Literary Society of Irfi akh Vol.I. Parti. (O'Donoghue.) Beltaine. An Occasional Publication. ...

... London, March 28th, 1000. Those who are 'interested in the literary associations of London will hear with regret of the approaching disappearance of another George Eliot house. The resi dence which is mainly associated with her greatest prosperity, that in St. John's Wood, has been destroyed through the advent of the Great Central Railway in that district. The house at Richmond, which is ...

... London, April 4th, 1900. There has naturally been very great excitement over the sale in New York of the library of Mr. Augustin Daly. Mr. Daly was an enthusiastic collector in many directions. He was, what is even more interesting, an expert Grangeriser. He Grangerised Boswell's Johnson, Forster's Life of Dickens, Canon Ainger's Lamb Letters, among other books, and he was able to Grangerise ...

... r For the first time since American enterprise seized upon the widely-circulating newspapers of London as a medium for selling books a newspaper book project has my entire approval. In other cases, as with the sale of the Bonn Library, of this or that dictionary, of the Hundred Best Books, of the Hundred Best Novels, and of the Encyclopedia Britannica, one could only find consolation in the ...

... There will be few exhibitions in London more popular than the collection of Romneys, which is to be opened at the Grafton Galleries in a few weeks. There will be one portrait by Romney, however, which we can hardly expect to see there. It is one which has a peculiar interest to-day, when a certain number of literary people are recalling the fact that Cowper has been dead exactly one hundred ...

... London, April 25th, igoo. At a time when everyone is praising a new book by a young writer there is a great temptation to go with the stream. But one owes something to oneself as well as to the susceptibilities of any individual author, and I must frankly confess that the reception of such a book as The Farringdons almost fills me with despair for English literature and for English criticism ...

... London, May 16th, iqoo. The bust of Sir Walter Scott which has just been sold at Willis's Rooms to Duveen has excited some interest among the most non-literary people by the mere accident of price, it having fetched 2,250 guineas. The bust was by Sir Francis Chantrey, and it was one of two of Sir Walter that he made. The first of these, executed in 1820, is at Abbotsford, but this was modelled ...

... London, May 23rd, 1900. There has just been discovered under curious cir cumstances a new portrait of the poet Cowper. The poet was born, it will be remembered, at Berk hampstead, and nearly opposite the parish church there stands an inn known as the Swan, which has been in the possession of one family for over a hundred years. A short time back, however, the Swan boasted a new landlord, ...

... j London, May ^oth, iqoo. It was a happy idea on the part of Mr. A. S. Boyd, the well-known illustrator of Punch and the Graphic, to give us an illustrated volume of travel after a journey with his wife through Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries, going by way of Port Said and Colombo, and returning by San Francisco and Chicago. Mrs. Boyd, who writes the narrative, has long been ...

... 1 London, Tune 2nd, iqoo. The printer is demanding copy, and I am off on a holiday trip, but as I write the war news is all-absorbing; mere literature is of no account, and I have no exclusive news. Under the circumstances silence is best. ^jphe only book that I have read is a new volume of Mr. Heinemann's Pioneer Series; Little Bob Dy WP> trom tne f rencn oy Atys t-ianara. Gyp's recent ...