The New York herald., 1922-07-09

age across the Atlantic and abounds
in the most abstruse technicalities.
He says: Half a dozen Glasgow
shipbuilders wrote to me to say
that they had held solemn conclave
together and were able to find two
mistakes in the story, and on one
of those they were not agreed.
This was rather different from an
old Scotchman. who, when Kip
ling's 'McAndrew's Hymn ap-
peared, wrote to tell me that he did
not approve of the authors Scotch
and had rewritten the poem prop
erly"
MR.. BURGIN tells that he was
ANA correcting the proof of Kip
ling's my Sunday at Home" and in
that proof, when the navy hauls
the squire out of his brougham, the
navy says, Come out, you {"
1T was just the word that navy
would have used, but it looked SO
awful in the cold nakedness Of
print that l was thunderstruck.
Barr and myself took sweet counsel
together. We dared not alter the
offending word lest Kipling should
withdraw the story. At last we de-
cided to send him the proof as it
was. It came back with the Offend
ing word altered to 'beggar' and
we breathed again." Once Mr..
Burgin ran against Kipling in a
London fog, and the latter casually
suggested what an easy thing it
would be for a man who had an
enemy to meet that enemy in fog,
take his arm, hold him in friendly
converse and then hurl him into
the river from Waterloo Bridge.
TN his chapter "On Getting Ones
1 Characters" Mr.. Burgin sums
up that perhaps on the whole the
greatest success of the modern
novelist is his villain, for it is
more than a little difficult to invent
a really original villain. Before
Wilkie Collins hit upon fat Count
Fosco with his white mice, lean
villains were the novelist's stock
characters, villains who were dark
and saturnine and pursued the
virtuous heroine with implacable
hostility and cigar Tin later days
a cigarette-at the Adelphi) in their
mouths. Even in their last mo-
ments the villains, with a prescience
Of what was ultimately in store for
them, smoked. / once flattered my
self on having invented a nice
villain, but rather overdid it, for
some one wrote to me to know why
I did not kill off the insipid hero
and let the villain Che did not
know that he was really the villain)
marry the heroine"
EROM Alfred Sutro, probably best
1 known in this country as a
translator of the work of Maeter-
linck, Mr.. Burgin heard the follow
ing story OF Paul Verlaine: He was
once at a meeting where Verlaine.
asked to talk about modern French
poets, began by saying: "As there
is only one modern French poet of
any importance, will now talk
about myself" Verlaine had a
friend called Bibi la Puree, who had
one failing-he could never resist
walking of with his friends
umbrella. After Verlaine's death
his friends got up subscription
for Bibi and gave him a banquet.
Some one alluded to Bib as re-
formed character. Bib was SO
touched by this unexpected tribute
to his moral worth that he went
out Of the room in order to hide
his emotion and disappeared with
twenty-six umbrellas.
A N Illuminating chapter of Lyt-
"A ton Strachey's Books and
Characters" fHarcourt, Brace &
Coz, which will be reviewed at
length in later issue of the Book
Section, deals with the relations Of
Xoltoira and Eradarick tho Great