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CATALOGUES.

WILFRID M. VOYNICH.

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ARGAINS in BOOKS.–SELLING OFF, 2%

PREVIOUS to RETIRING.-Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 70 vol, nice half-calf, £12 (cost £100)-Cruikshank's Life in Paris, First Edition, £6-Lewis's Topographical Dictionary. 5 large vols., 12s. (cost £10)-Dickens's Novels (any), First Editions, 9 each; ditto Thackeray; ditto Charles LeverBritish Classics, nice Set, 40 vols., £4 (cost about £20-All the Year Round, 60 vols., nice as new, £9-Month, 70 vols., £9-The Lancet 55 vols, half-calf, £3-Law Journal Reports 100 vols., £30-Blackwo d's Magazine, 50 vols., fine order, £4-Belgravia, 50 well-bound vols, nice as new, £5-Bentley's Miscellany, 50 vols.. £20; another 1 t. 35 vols., £12-Fortnightly Review, 20 handsome vols. £4-50 strongly bound vo's, of various Magazines, 298.-Rogers's Poems and Italy, choice Pair, £3; another Pair, 303.- Somersetshire and Gloucestershire Archeological Society's Transactions, splendid Set, £4-100 various vols. Tales, Travels, Biographies, Sketches, sound clean lot. £2.-LOWE'S Bookshop, New St. (next the Grammar School), Birmingham,

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"THE HISTORY OF 'PUNCH,'

66

in 25,

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A number of Special Bookcases for PUNCH have been manufactured and will be supplied to purchasers of THE
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* The Half-morocco Binding is specially to be commended. It is in the best quality of Red Full-grained Morocco, and is a remarkably rich binding at a moderate pric".

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NOW READY, at all Booksellers' and Libraries. In 1 vol., crown 8vo, cloth, with 58 Illustrations. Price 2s. 6d.

China and the Chinese.

Translated and Edited from the French of EDMUND
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By Mrs. ARTHUR BELL (N. D'Anvers),
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NEW HUMOROUS BOOK BY
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THE

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tersely written, and contains several attractive illustrations."

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London: GRANT RICHARDS, 9, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, W.C.

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION

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SCIENCE, ARTS, AND EDUCATION.

FIRST INTERNATIONAL ASSEMBLY, PARIS EXHIBITION, 1900.

The Assembly recruits Members for the Official Congresses, and gives Information to those interested about Congresses, Exhibition and University Arrangements. For Visitors to the Exhibition a Guidance Scheme, comprising Lectures, Visits to the Galleries of the Exhibition, Excursions in and around Paris, Entertainments, &c., has been arranged, and is now in working order.

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A Weekly Review of Literature and Life.

No. 1468. Established 1869.

The Literary Week.

23 June, 1900.

TOLSTOI, we imagine, will find himself able to bear the latest arrow of outrageous fortune with equanimity. The Holy Synod of Russia has issued a secret ukase excommunicating him on account of his novel, Resurrection. It declares that Tolstoi has shown himself clearly and plainly to be an enemy of the Orthodox Christian Church. Among other sins, he is charged with distorting the sacred text of the Gospel, finding fault with Holy Church, calling it a human arrangement, and so on.

MR. GEORGE MOORE has finished the first writing of his novel Sister Teresa, which we are informed is not a sequel to Evelyn Innes. Sister Teresa was contained in the original idea, and the publication of Evelyn Innes was decided on because the book had lengthened out to 500 pages, and Mr. Moore's publisher felt that novels of 1,000 pages in length would demand some new form of publication not easy to devise. Sister Teresa will be as long, or nearly as long as Evelyn Innes, and when the two books are brought together, as Mr. Moore hopes they will ultimately be, the story of Evelyn Innes will be the longest novel ever written about one character, for together the two books will contain about 300,000 words. As soon as Sister Teresa is finished Mr. Moore will begin to re-write Evelyn Innes. The two books will be published together probably in the spring of next year.

MR. FRANKFORT MOORE writes (apropos of this remark in our Bibliographical page last week: "Mr. Frankfort Moore has just made Nell Gwyn the central figure of a novel, thus following immediately in the wake of Mr. Anthony Hope "):

To prevent the confusion which might arise from our both addressing the same lady, do me the favour to allow me to remind you that the first of my "Nell Gwyn" episodes appeared in the pages of Pearson's Magazine eighteen months before Mr. Anthony Hope's "Simon Dale" had begun its course in serial form. Your mention last week of the fact that my "Nell Gwyn, Comedian," followed hard upon "Simon Dale " suggests that I was made aware of the possibilities of the "Impudent Comedian" by studying her portrait as painted by the master hand of Mr. Anthony Hope. Though I daresay I might have done so with great advantage to my art, yet, having written and printed my story, the privilege of following in the wake of another novelist was denied to me.

MR. CHARLES WHIBLEY has marked his recovery from severe illness by the completion of his editorial work on the "Tudor Translations." Vol. III. of Rabelais, which comprises Motteaux' version of Books IV. and V., will shortly be in the subscribers' hands.

Two literary clubs, the Johnson and the Whitefriars, have chosen Stratford-on-Avon as the scene of their annual outing. The Whitefriars Club has the advantage over the Johnson Club in that the members will take tea, so we learn from the Sphere, with Miss Marie Corelli.

Price Threepence. [Registered as a Newspaper.]

AMONG the contents of the new number of the AngloSaxon Review we note "The Logic of Events," by Mr. Maurice Hewlett; "The Limitations of Art," by Mr. W. H. Mallock; and "An Eclogue of the Downs," by Mr. John Davidson.

MR. JAMES LANE ALLEN's new novel, The Increasing Purpose (formerly announced under the title of The Hempbreaker), will be published shortly by Macmillan & Co. The key-note of the story is given in Tennyson's well-known lines from "Locksley Hall":

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose

runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Ir is a little difficult to keep pace with Mr. Crockett's exhuberant production. This week we review Joan of the Sword Hand; this week, too, his newest novel, Little Anna Mark, is upon us. It has 446 pages, and begins thus:

“Come in hither, Joe Janet! Here you will see at one eye-blink the whole cursed pack kennelled, the lying priest that slandered me, the fatted English calf that disinherited me, and the gap-toothed old hound that begat me-and did me other disservice beside!"

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THE issue of the "Works of George Warrington Steevens" has begun with a volume entitled Things Seen: Impressions of Men, Cities, and Books. The title hardly fits such of the contents of the volume as the article on Mr. Balfour's Philosophy," "From the New Gibbon," or "The New Humanitarianism." A golden-brown canvas has been chosen for the binding; the Hon. John Collier's admirable portrait of Mr. Steevens is reproduced as frontispiece. Mr. G. S. Street has selected and edited; and Mr. Henley has written the introductory Memoir, which, however, is rather to be described as a critical appreciation. When Mr. Steevens joined the Daily Mail, this is how he stood, Mr. Henley thinks:

He had shown, not once but many times, that he could understand. He was now to prove to admiration that he could both understand and see: that, given a figure, an aspect, an incident, even a great and notable passage in affairs, he could apply that admirable brain of his to the task of observing and realising what he saw, on lines so essential and so clean that, his faculty of speech thrown in, 'twas easy for him-almost too easy-to pass on the final effect of his vision. This is putting it baldly enough, no doubt; and I do not know that it will make matters very much better to note that, at the time of his recording his impressions in the terms which made his fame, he stood alone among English journalists. To be sure, the capacity he showed was not now for the first time shown in English journalism. Dickens had exampled it, and that with " an immense and far-reaching instinct of the Picturesque" (I quote from memory, from Mr. Henry James); so had Ruskin; so had Meredith and R. L. Stevenson; so had Rudyard Kipling. I do not think that Steevens was deeply read in any of these writers; and that I do not think so is enough to show that I hold him better versed in Greek and Latin than he was in English. All the same, he was cut out of the same stuff with them: the peculiar capacity for vision and realisation, which was theirs, was his also; so that his "Omdurman," done amid the stinks and horrors of the field, is like to remain a classic and a classic unsurpassed-for many years to come. He had a sort of visual grip of things: not reckless, nor haphazard, nor touched with sentiment; but alert, athletic, of an absolute and unalterable serenity. I am told (and I can very well believe) that a certain commander-inchief, himself the hardest and sternest of communicants, has, on his own confession, been more than once indebted to George's despatches for essentials in his own. The volume, to which we shall return, renews one's knowledge of the variety of Mr. Steevens's work.

THE strongest and most original appreciation of the late Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson which has yet come in our way is certainly Mr. Henley's in the Pall Mall Magazine. It is a little startling to find Mr. Henley writing such sentences as these of R. A. M. S. and R. L. S. :

Each is a loss to us. But I think, as I sit here writing of both, that we shall get ten Lewises, or a hundred even, or ever we get a Bob.

Certainly a little startling; but Mr. Henley has a right to the opinion. He suggests that R. A. M. S. was the greater, though the less productive and definable man; and he places them in the relation of master and pupil :

Lewis [Mr. Henley's spelling] Stevenson was, of course, for all his weak lung, one of fortune's favourites; but I have ever thought, and I shall ever believe that, in having his cousin for a chief influence in his beginnings, he was especially favoured-favoured, it may be, even beyond his d: serts.

Mr. Henley is writing with R. A. M. S.'s talk in his ears. The books of R. L. S. are before us; but his cousin's talk is returned to air, and perhaps no single register of it has been kept. Not all able men write; some of the ablest loathe writing. Mr. Henley says that R. A. M. S. loathed it. "His true gift was that of talk; and he had itHeavens in what perfection! I think I've heard the best of my time; but among them there is but one

R. A. M. S." Here is his picture of R. A. M. S. among his listeners, in his own room:

Someone, bright-eyed, a little flushed, ever courteous, ever kindly, ever humorous, taking any bit of the Universe as his theme, descanting upon it as if he had a prescriptive right in it, and delighting everyone who listened by the unfailing excellence, wisdom, sanity-(however insane it seemed at times!) of what he had to say. Says a friend of his, and mine, in a letter announcing his death: " He was commentary, and that should go on for ever. Good commentary on whatever God saw fit to provide. It seems to me to dwindle the applications of the Universe that it can no longer serve for his interpretations." Had Lewis lived to reassert himself, and had it been possible for any one of us to sit and heed while these two-the Master and the Pupil-talked of That which is, That which must be, and That which may be, then should we have heard about the best that spoken speech can do.

WHO invented the Circulating Library? Mr. Archibald Clark, who tries to answer this question in the Library, is properly cautious. Hints and projects there may have been in abundance before the Rev. Samuel Fancourt started his circulating library in Crane-court, Fleet-street, next door to the Royal Society, about 1740 or 1742. Fancourt was a Nonconformist minister at Salisbury, who was driven up to London by some quarrel with his congregation. Author, schoolmaster, and librarian, he struggled along for many years in London. Time has saved few particulars of his methods of working the library, which was governed by a committee. The subscription was a guinea a year at first, but it was considerably reduced later. Fancourt seems to have got together about 3,000 volumes, and to have attracted many subscribers; but in the end things went badly with him, and he died in Hoxton under the caro of religious people in his ninetieth year. The details of his work in Crane-court are few and vague, and the interest of Mr. Clark's article would have been increased if he had given the titles of some of the more typical books in Fancourt's Catalogue; for he compiled a catalogue.

AMONG books which have been "called back "-reissued, that is to say, to meet an entirely new demand-must be numbered Major-Gen. Baden Powell's The Downfall of Prempeh, first published in 1896. It is now reissued in Messrs. Methuen's Sixpenny Library, with illustrations "after" B.-P.'s own sketches. A few of the illustrations, however, do not appear to have been re-drawn. B.-P.'s "Apology to the Reader" is a very characteristic document. The reason for the book:

On every side I am badgered-and I suppose that most of the other members of the expedition have been similarly badgered--with the remark:

"Oh, you have come back? Now I do hope you are writing a book about it. You are wasting your opportunities if you don't."

These importunities have reached a climax. I will take the plunge. I will shut myself up for four days, and will overhaul my diary.

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