LITERARY NOTES FROM LONDON.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 302, 1 June 1875, Page 4

LITERARY NOTES FROM LONDON.

A correspondent of the Argus supplies the following notes, under date London, March 19th:—

There are few departments in literature in which such extensive and radical change is to be looked for and may be studied with so much curiosity and profit as the encyclopaadic. The old things that are passing away which have found careful chronicle in works of this kind, and the new things which are taking their places, the problems of the past which have become the postulates of the present—these are all most interesting to investigate, and make the examination of the first volume of the gigantic " Encyclopaedia Britannica " as attractive on general as it is valuable on specific grounds. This vast work, the result of erudite painstaking, is a reflection of the modern intellect, a statement of eclectic and combined knowledge up to the present epoch of its progress, and is of absolute novelty as well as of transcendent interest in all the definitions which relate to the physical sciences. The word " Anatomy " is the last reached in this vast dictionary of meaning, with its historical and biographical addenda; and there could hardly be a better specimen selected than that very topic to exhibit the progress of science and the liberal breadth of deductions from it since the time of the old encyclopajdias, which were,' however, faithful representations of the knowledge of their respective eras. The last edition was published eight years ago, and since then physical science has made greater strides than it had made in the fifteen years which intervened between that and the preceding edition. We shall see the vast difference more distinctly in the succeeding volumes (with what pleasure! the general reader, debarred by want of time or opportunity from special sources of instruction, will examine the volumes which shall treat of the genesis of man, of evolution, of development, and of electricity 1) and the eminently readable style of the first gives us room for expectation that the succeeding p ortions of this invaluable work will be equally within the range of ordinary intelligence, while acceptable to the most cultivated tastes. It is supposed that encyclopaedias, are not intended for scholars; they are to drink deeper than is practicable in such comparatively shallow wells; but we can imagine no greater incitement to scholarship than the study of such a book as the " Encyclopedia Britannica." There is perhaps a little too much latitude allowed by the learned and able editor, Professor Baynes, to writers of the biographical notices of persons lately deceased, and also to the introduction of political speculations. This latitude sometimes lends an air of essayisra to the treatment of subjects which ought to be distinctly narrative ; for instance, in the case of the article on America. The late esteemed and lamented Canon Kingsley contributed a biographical notice of the late Dean Alford, which is very long, highly eulogistic, but not in the tone simply narrative, and of the chronicle order which befits an encyclopedia. Some of our leading critics have objected to the biographical notice of Addison, which occupies nine pages, as unsuited to the encyclopedia form; but I cannot see this. People whose libraries are fully stored with literature in many or most of its ramifications, will, indeed, have the well-known lives and essays upon those lives of our great English leaders of thought and masters of style to refer to; but the people who will look to the " Encyclopedia" to form almost the whole of their library, will be very glad to find such ample information for their reference. As earnestly as Henry IV. of France is said to have wished that there might be a fowl in the pot in every cottage in his kingdom, do I wish that this volume and its successors might have a place on the bookshelves of every middle class house. How often have I heard people say, " But you can't read an encyclopedia !" If they would just try they would find it fascinating reading, abounding with the attraction of the unexpected and the unknown. Perhaps only an inveterate reader, who looks about under all circumstances for a book, and undergoes a kind of mental gasping like that of a fish out of water, when he finds himself bookless, can comprehend the pleasure to be derived from a dictionary or a gazetteer, or even a guide book to a place which one never expects and does not particularly want to see; there is a pleasure of this kind, apart from its great instructive value, in reading this volume. One makes a charming excursion with Colonel Yule to Affghanistan, with Mr David Kay to Algeria, one climbs the Alps with Mr Ball, and goes to Africa with MiKeith Johnston. We have only to hope that we may be permitted to perform the ima ginary voyage to Australia, when the lal ours of the compilers of this gigantic book shall have reached that stage of their progress, in as good company. A translation of M. Lecroix's " History of the Eighteenth Century" is in preparation. The original work is a very learned and interesting production, which embraces almosi every possible aspect of the epoch which it

elucidates —an epoch becoming each day more difficult for us to realise, as the old modes of thought retire farther and farther into the dim distance, aud yet are not crystalised as those which we call " ancient" have become. This is an onerous work alike for the translator and the publisher, for it is elegantly and idiomatically written, and the illustrations are fine and numerous. A great deal of attention has been excited in France, and some here, by an account written by M. Henry Havard, a well known French traveller, of his circumnavigation of the Zuyder Zee, and called " Voyage Pittoresque aux Ville* Mortes du Zuider Zee." There appears to have been pretty general ignorance until this book appeared that in any part of Europe such remains of mediaeval times were to be seen, as those of Hoorn, Medenblik, Stavoren, Enkhuysen, and Monhikendam, and the existence of the island of Marken, with its fisher population, its peculiar costumes, unaltered for centuries, and its characteristic manners, was almost unknown. The narrative is very interesting, with its gentle appeal to the spirit of adventure, for the voyager on the Zuyder Zee must provide his own ship and find his own crew, and its strong appeal to the love of the ancient and the picturesque, which lingers somewhere in every cultivated mind. The newest sea in the eastern hemisphere is not easy to navigate, because it is shallow and full of sandbanks, but the sights to be seen upon its shores, and those shores, themselves, would compensate for slower and more difficult sailing than that of the Yalk, in which M. Havard and his artist friend accomplished the feat of circumnavigation which perhaps not ten Dutchmen now living have ever attempted. During the last year "M'Millan's Magazine" was considerably enlivened by the contribution to its pages of some remarkably interesting chapters on travels in Spain. They were quite novel and unconventional, dealt not with the too well trodden ground of the cities, but with the comparatively unknown rural and mining districts of Southern Spain, and were distinguished by sympathy and kindliness towards the Spanish people, and absence of that kind of sitting in judgment upon an essentially strange nation, with all the English notions ready to be produced as a standard whereby to measure them, and all the English tastes ripe for revolt against everything which did not conform to them, which is much too common in our books of European, and more especially of Spanish travel. They attracted a good deal of attention and speculation at the time, and they have just been republished, under the title of " Untrodden Spain and her Back Country." The book is deeply interesting, and by far the most valuable which has been written on Spain for many years, in fact since the old regime in that country was overthrown, and the country given up to anarchy and misery (for Mr Hare's " Wanderings in Spain," though most delightful, was quite dilettante) ; and it places the natives of the southern provinces in a totally new light. After one has read the account of these people given by the Rev Hugh James Rose, chaplain to the English, French, and German mining companies of Linares, it is impossible to despise the Spaniards Linares, the scene of his own ministeria labors, is to be reached by the Madrid and Cordova railway, but it is a remote and little known place, and all the information which he gives concerning the population of miners is quite novel. In most respects the comparison which he draws between the English and Spanish miner is very much to the advantage of the latter. There are some highly amusing chapters upon sporting matters, but the gem of the book is its delightful heart-warming description of the system and administration of the charitable institutions of Cadiz and Cordova. It would be a good thing if every public body called to deliberate upon the care and guardianship of the poor and the sick, of old people and little children, would master and mark the details which Mr Rose gives concerning the administration of La Caridad at Cadiz. The mixture of good sense, tenderness, refinement, and perfect self-abnega-tion in the system of public charity, and its administrators, would seem to belong to the Spanish nation as an inalienable inheritance. In Mr Geiger's book on Mexico, one of the most prejudiced and intemperate works in existence—it gives one the impression of having been written, right through, in a blazing rage—he gives a beautiful description of a great hospital, in one of the worst of the Mexican cities, where everything is done for the sufferers simply to the perfection of the ideal of beneficence and skill. Mr Rose's book is quite the most valuable recent contribution to our literature of travel.

As a natural consequence of the death of Sir Arthur Helps, we have a new edition of his works, and everybody is reading them all over again, or at all events talking of them. Many "appreciations" of him have appeared, and though some are colder than others, there is not one inimical in tone. Indeed, he was one of the few men who never had an enemy, even among men of letters. He had no rivals, for though he adopted several " lines " in literature successively, such as drama, poetry, essayism, history, and fiction, he worked on each in a way exclusively his own, which involved no comparisons and evoked no rivalry.