New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1902-12-19
LITERARY NOTES.

A Second Folio Shakespeare. measuring Ii
inches by So inches. with portrait by Droeshout
and verses by Ben Jonson 1852, was sold in
London the other day for s., 100. It unfortu-
nately had two leaves supplied from shorter
copy.
An illustrated edition of R L. Stevenson s
Fables" limited to $50 copies, has been brought
out by the Longrnans.
That vivacious and irrepressible critic and
essayist, Max Beerbohm. has finished his long
promised novel. and it will be published next
spring. II is to bear the queer name of 'Zuleika
Dobson-'
A book which has had notable success in
England during the autumn just past is the
abridged edition of John Wesley's journal" A
new issue of ten thousand copies is now in
course Of printing.
The Adventurer in SPAIN is the general title
of a series of connected stories projected by Mr.
s r Crockett. He has been travelling in the
land Of Don Quixote as a preliminary exercise
The Tribune has often deplored the vulgariZa-
ton in American schools of great literature,
and we accordingly take pleasure in quoting the
utterance of an American, Mr. Boyd Winches-
ter on what he calls the ignoble use of the
classics He says. in the course Of paper in
The Nineteenth Century:
1t is the failure to distinguish between the
spirit and the mechanism of language, in the
unwillingness 10 recognize literature as having
claims apart from philology. that the danger
of the present tendency chiefly consists; A Ger,
tain dry. lexicogra phical habit of mind Is SAID
by Europeans to be the distinctive mark of
American scholarship; that under a civilization
hard and positive in temper
We teach and teach
Until. like drumming pedagogues We lose
The thought that what We teach has higher ENDS
Than being taught and learned;
that the best of literature is being forced under
the yoke Of textbooks and must yield 70 the
''proprieties Of a dim-eyed scholarship; and the
dia grams with which II is sought TO illuminate
the classfcations of literature fairly make ones
head swim. With cubes Jriangles, intersecting
involved and manacled. we find the best of
ancient and modern literature-Chaucer. Milton
and Goldsmith annotated; Scott prepared for
local examinations; Byron edited; Shelley
boiled down for the use of babes; Wordsworth
and Keats captured; Shakespeare subjected to
phonetic and infectional systems; and even the
Bible. noble a piece Of prose as any tongue
can boast Of. made the torture chamber of child
hood, turned into a task book, book or i'm
positions and punishment-a cruel misuse at
once rousing in the mind feeling OF dulness
and depression
out Of this scholastic isoation-rescued from
this ignoble use. This habit should be counter
acted giving abundant stimulus ana en-
enlargement to their study as literature In
the Classics if anywhere, there is need 10 insist
on a scholarship that will lay hold on some
faculty higher than the memory.
We have hearty sympathy for Mr. Winches
ter's view of the case. The turning of literary
classics into textbooks has betrayed an extraor-
binary lack Of intellectual capacity and culture
in the work of education in this country. If the
pupil on leaving school shows utter. indifference
to literature and inability to acquire taste he
can hardly be held blameworthy.
Many of the characters in Levers novel
Charles O'Malley.' appear as actual historical
personages in the just-published autobiography
of William Grattan, of the Connaught Rangers
This Grattan first cousin of Grattan the
novelist and a distant kinsman of Henry Graf
tan. the statesman.
Mr. A z. w. Mason. the author of that de-
lightful novel, THE Four Feathers" is writing
a love story of to-day-a story of English
society.
Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's volume of short
stories, "A Sea Turn is already in it's third
edition. Its entertaining qualities ought to
carry it into many another thousand.
The letters written by the author of Lorna
Doone" to Mrs. L. D. Fuller make up very
attractive pages of the December "Scribner."
A fine, reserved and modest nature is revealed
therein and cannot but feel that 1t is the hap
pier for departure from a world whose new
methods are ill-adapted to a shrinking per-
sonality. He loathed, for example, the idea of
having his photograph given to the public
against which my nature exclaims." he says
and it was sent to his American correspondent
under faithful promise not TO lend it. What
can be presunnptuous." he adds, than for
any writer. even a great one, to push his own
littleness the large world?"
There is a charming glimpse of the novelist
at home-a picture to which he would not have
objected-in Mrs. Fullers paper: The birds
which haunted his gardens he knew individ-
ually. and recognized them from season TO sea-
SON. They came In numbers into his study win
dows at his call. blackbrd had come
that winter, and had repeatedly tapped upon
brought young lady with him. They had built
in his garden, and raised two families of young
birds. who already knew his whistle. Though
the birds made havoc with his fruit yet he well
coined them all save the starlings These swept
down in a great flock, from Bushy Park upon
his garden, and remained for some two hours
each afternoon, sometimes killing his fsvorites
and to them he sometimes felt obliged to take
MS gun Quite interesting was his feeling for
cats and dogs-invalid CATS skeietonic cats and
hungry dogs. came to him for succor. and he
called an old Newfoundland dog from a warm
rf