... . MR. J. M. BARRIE'S play, Quality Street, which has had a most successful run in America, will probably be produced in London in the autumn. The details are not settled, but it is practically certain that Miss Maude Adams will not come to England. Mr. Barrie has not yet begun another play. The Confessions of a. Wife, by Mary Adams, now being published in the Century Magazine are creating ...

... MR. HALL CAINE has completed his play based on The Eternal City, and goes to America early in September to rehearse it. A striking experiment is shortly to be made with The Eternal City, which is to be published on both sides of the Atlantic in a new form, at fifty cents and two shillings. It will be so abridged as to contain nothing but the human story, and will, of course, serve as a ...

... . THE charge of plagiarism brought against M. Edmond Rostand by a certain Mr. Gross, of Chicago, has, it would appear, been taken seriously in America, where Mr. Gross has obtained an injunction against the further production of Cyrano de Bero-erac; but in France it has been received with intense amuse ment. The hero of Mr. Gross's piece, The Merchant Prince ot Cornville, is Cyrano de ...

... . AN EXPERT OF THE ROW. THE opening of the Art Galleries has given an impetus to the issue of works in this particular branch of literature. Amongst the most important is a series entitled The Makers of British Art, the first volume issued being SIR EDWIN LANDSEER, R.A., BY JAMES A. MANSON (WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED). This work claims to be something more than a mere monograph of this ...

... WHEN an author in the third line of his Preface formally greets the reviewers, to whom he says his book is of triple profit, the industrious critic is bound to reply at the earliest opportunity, Aleikum Salaam. Common courtesy thus satisfied, the reviewer is at liberty to inquire into the dark saying triple profit, and, at once acquitting his author of any genially sardonic allusion to ...

... . THE UNSPEAKABLE SCOT (Grant Richards), certainly the most candid book of the new century, has been written, its author declares, for Englishmen, but it is also in the nature of a broad hint for Scotchmen. So far, so good; but hints, runs the Caledonian proverb, are just as fowk taks them, and if Mr. T. W. H. Crosland's persuasive suggestions should be interpreted otherwise than he ...

... THE BOOK AND ITS AUTHOR. SPORT AND POLITICS UNDER AN EASTERN SKY. THE EARL OF RONALDSHAY, the author of this imposing and superbly produced volume (William Blackwood and Sons), says in his opening remarks that one of the features of the latter half of last century was to be found in the extraordinary facilities everywhere given the traveller, no matter to what distant or comparatively ...

... FIVE NEW NOVELS. THE MAID-AT-ARMS. By R. W. Chambers. Constable 6s.) To Mr. R. W. Chambers we have learned to look for Romance, with a fine play of incident and sufficient analysis of motive to render the work intensely human. Problem and psychology are not necessary to the success of Mr. Chambers's work, and, to tell the truth, his story is usually so good that we are not concerned to ...

... By Thomas Cobb. (Chapman and Hall. 6s.) New book though it is, Mr. Thomas Cobb's latest volume is not likely to cause that besieging of the circulating libraries by literary dowagers and their grand-daughters of which Hazlitt writes so bitterly in one of his most caustic essays. However important such commonplace love-affairs as those dealt with by Mr. Cobb may be to the participants, they are ...

... By Sir Gilbert Parker. (Heinemann. 6s.) This is a collection of short stories, in nearly all of which appears Donovan Pasha --Little Dicky Donovan-- the English Secretary of the Khedive Ismail, and there was no man in Egypt of so much importance as he. This is not the first time that Sir Gilbert has published a book of short stories, and yl thosewho recall the vigour, YU variety, and ...

... 44 THE TRAITORS. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. (Ward, Lock. 6s.) The audacity of Mr. Phillips Oppenheim in undertaking to write the history of yet another imaginary State in Eastern Europe is equalled only by the plausibility with which he has performed his task. In Theos there flourishes a less deft form of epigram than in Ruritania, but there is quite as much adventure of the headlong kind. Mr. ...

... THE BOOK AND ITS AUTHOR. THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE. IN two handsome volumes Mr. Justin McCarthy presents as with a series of pictures, sometimes brilliant and always interesting, of what is generally termed the Augustan Age of English History. The Reign of Queen Anne (Chatto and Windus) is no dry-as-dust historical compilation, full of minute but arid detail conscientiously laboured, neither ...