Watertown republican. [volume] (Watertown, Wis.) 1860-1906, 1872-08-28
Literature and Art.

reside In California Tor some time to
come. He is working with might and
main upon large picture from Cali
fornia scenery.
COLONEL GEO. W. MUMFoRD, former
Secretary of the Commonwealth of
Virginia, is putting his recollections of
men and events of his official life into
historical work.
WILLIAM PAGE is at work in his
studio on his portrait of Shakespeare.
This work has engaged the artists at
tention for several months past, and
when finished, which will be some time
during the present year, it will, no
doubt, attract quite as much notice as
his head of Christ, which was exhibited
at the National Academy of Design in
1871.
A WORK on the coal regions of
America will shortly be brought out by
the Appletons, under the title of Gun
derground Treasures; Where and how
to Find Them; Key for the Ready
Determination of all the Useful Miner
ais within the United States" Prof.
James orion will also soon publish a
work of great use and value to those
prospecting among mines, real or sup
posed -.rs
MORTIMER COLLINS has published a
satire which has excited much attention,
called " British Birds" Tennyson is
satirized as Hair" Browning as
Brow" and Swinburne as Beard"
The statesmen are, Gladstone, "Latus-
lapis;" Bismarck, Bisnotus," and
Theirs, Lachrym@;" while Huxley is
g Protoplast; )" Tyndall, "Germ :"
Darwin, : Gorilla" and Stuart Mill,
ESewing machine"
A New YORK journalist, in ransack-
ing the posthumous papers of his
grandfather, an x-Westchester county
official, during last week, stumbled
across an unpaid check for $21 900
which the deceased had won in 1901 in
lottery for the encouragement of lit
erature, lotteries being legalized in
those days. $3.50 EFFs
HURD's grass is not good article for
human food. 1t is very slow of diges-
ton. A Connecticut paper swears that
man at Montville coughed up a head
of this plant which he swallowed seven
teen years ago. It was hard as stone
and retained its form and fiber per-
fectly.
JEAN LEMoINNE, the Partisan Jour-
nalist, has written the life of Eugene
Sue, the novelist, which contains some
curious disclosures about the private
affairs of that wonderfully successful
writer. LemOlnne, who was for many
years an intimate friend of Sue, saws
that the latter took a strangely morbid
interest IN cruel and bloody scenes. He
never failed to be present at any exc
cution III Paris, and watched with his
opera glass the face of the doomed Gull
prlt, from the moment he appeared on
the scaffold to the bloody end. One day
he went to England for the sole pur-
pose Of witnessing a fogging scene, and
he often regretted that he had never
been able to see a Russian knouting.
THE defect III average American lit
erature and art lies in the haste with
which all material is worked up and
thrust crudely before the public. Two
weeks i'll the 70 Semitic or Yellowstone
region gives us mountain painter in
Smith; chance week in yacht de-
luges us with marine views for years
afterward from Brown an hours ride
in railway car fills the notebooks of
our many coming American novel
lists" with characters Our artists with
both pen and pencil work, as it were,
from hand to mouth; their bread, in
housekeepers' phrase, is made of
raw flour. 1t would be worth
their while to compare Hawthorne's
notebooks with his finished work, to
observe how long the ideas were suffer.
ed to lie fallow before they were slowly
titled and brought. forth into fruit so
perfect and enduring. The real differ
ence, perhaps, lies in the fact that in
one case the work is done from the life
long love of art, in the other from the
daily necessity of money; but until that
difference is recognized the prospect
for both our art and literature is but
a fungus growth, strong and rank for
the time it lasts, but that time will be
but day.