The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1898-02-06
LITERARY NOTES.

Andrew Lang is engaged in writing new
series of Letters to Dead Authors which
are 10 appear this year.
Mr.. Hamlin Garland is completing. in
Washington, the life of Gen. L. S. Grant.
on which he has been steadily engaged for
two years,
Are there books enough TO go round in
England?" asks the London Mail. The lit
erary output of 1897 shows that our trans
atlantic cousins had l,i00 more books at
their disposal in 1881 than in 1886.
A memoir of the late Duchess of Teck is
announced by Murray 1t has been under
taken, at the request of her family. by Mr..
c. kinloch Cooke. who has had placed at
OF her royal highness. The work will prob
ably be ready about Easter.
A very patient man writes to a London
journal: I'm January, a year ago, asked
for a book of the librarian at the British
Museum, and the answer was, 1t is at the
Binders | called again this month, Janu-
airy. 1898, and asked for the same book, and
1.-THE answer was. AT the binders.
Mr.. r. Frankfort Moore is at present en-
gagged in the work of dramatizing his novel,
1.-THE Jessamy Bride in which the hero is
Oliver Goldsmith. The book itself has had
q considerable success in England, and IN
America. while it made no sensation Its
sale is greater now than when 1t was hrst
published.
Mrs. Frances Hodgson- Burnett, who has
just sailed for Europe, has an ambition to
write the much-talked of and long-expected
great American novel;" In fact. Mrs Bur-
nett has already written part of the story.
which she hopes the public and the critics
will receive as a work meeting the eXpecta-
tion of a really great American masterpiece.
This new book Will be called The Great
Willoughby Claim !"
The British Medical Journal has an inter-
esting article on Keats as medical stu
dent. The reviewer who advised the poet to
go back to his gallipots will probably be in
famous forever, but it was well worth Civ
ing these details of Keats's medical course.
He was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond.
surgeon, in 1910. He was OF course, regarded
as Il 'Oafer," and in 1914 master and APP
prentice parted. and Keats became a stu
dent at the United Hospitals of Guy and
St Thomas, In 1916 he was duly admitted a
licentiate Of the Society Of Apothecaries.
Probably the brutal advice to go back to
his gallipots would have had dangerous re-
suits ii Keats had acted on it.
Somebody who has been delving the files
of the Dayton 90 Transcript, a paper once
published by w. ID. Howells's father, finds
this in the issue of June %, 1850: William
D. Howells, son of the editor, thirteen years
old. who has set type occasionally in the
last two years, began setting type yester-
day on bourgeois at o'clock in the morn
ing and by in the evening he had up nine
thousand and five hundred ems, or four col
umnS of this days paper. tie carried MS
route of papers in the morning before ne
began" The columns mentioned in that
issue of the Transcript are seven and
quarter inches long ana two and a quarter
inches wide. That little bit of boyish skill
was certainly not to be despised
A literary periodical has recently been
proving by figures collected from various
authentic sources that poetry does not by
any means lack readers i'll these acknowl-
edged days Of prose. The showing for
poetry indeed was surprisingly good, the
Book Buyer says, and the readers who are
gently clamorous for it may be encouraged
by the following figures: OF the 54S manu-
scripts submitted to d Boston publishing
house in 1897. the works of fiction, as might
be expected led the numbers. OF these pro-
auctions there were 212. 1t is a far cry to
the next figure, but that figure represented
the Offering of verse. and 1t was sixty-nine.
Then came forty-four books for young peo-
pie, and the remaining books comprised es-
says. histories, travel. biography and re-
ligious and other works. This is by no
means to say that siXty-nine books of verse
We're accepted and published. but merely to
reassure the poetical reader who may imag-
inc that the poetcal writer is forgetting
him.