The Warwickshire Herald. — 1899-01-26 (Birmingham, West Midlands, England)

THE SOCIETY PAPERS.  (From the World.)  The Queen is to hold a Council at Osborne ca Saturday. February 4th, when the Speech which is to be delivered from the Them, at the opening of Parliament will be submitted to her Majesty for approval. The Duke of liariborough will go to Court upon this occasion, in cedar that he may be swore in as a Privy Councillor, on his appointment aa Paymester-general.  The evening parties given by the Queen at Osborne last week were the ant entertainments of the kind which have taken place at the Palace since the death of Prince Henry of Hattenberg, and they wee of • quasi-official character, being really given by Princess Beatrice, as Governor of the Isle of Wight. The musical entertainment took place on each night in the magnificent Dart= Room, which is now lighted by electricity, and the guests were afterwards presented to the Queen in the large drawing-room. The parties were "full-dress" functions. It is at present quite uncertain whether the Quo's' herself will hold either of the Drawing-Rooms which have been announced, nor will this question be settled for another month. If her Majesty does some to town for one of the Drawing-Rooms, she will then receive the Corps Diplomatique, the Ministers, and the nth* company, leaving Princess Christian to take the general presentations. The chances now are that the Queen will not visit Buckingham Palace before the first week in May, but much will depend upon the weather.  Once more the temerarious Profeaaor Falb—who seems to delight in assuming the character of a kind of meteorological "Mad Mullah "—has taken upon himself to prophesy the approaching end of the trorld. Undeterred by the failures of the late Mother tiltrotor.. the present Prophet Baxter, and others whose exempts§ should have sufficed to warn him off so dubious a course, the Austrian seer has committed himself to the extent of fixing the exact date for the final cataclysm, which he bids us expect as alarmingly soon as November 13th in the present year. On that day, it appears, the earth will come into collision with the comet Biala, and Blebs will get so much the better of the encounter that the subsequent oroesedinp will interest the inhabitants of this planet no mom for the latter, and everything it contains, "will be reduced to atoms." We know that comet. It is so old a friend, in fact, that we have ceased to believe in its tale.  Sir John Bridge is to be congratulated upon the check he administered last week to a peculiariy obnoxious form of morbid sensationalism, which in these days obtains a great deal too much encouragement. His refusal to accede to the application of • solicitor for the surrender by the police of • certain knife with which • recent murder was committed was obviously dictated by the suspicion that the weapon was required for purposes of exhibition; and it would be well if the course he adopted were followed, whenever porsible, in all similar cases. It will be a disastrous illustration of the irony of fate if the arrangement for the projected PAWS Conference should end in a serious international quarrel. Such an eventuality, however, is already rendered possible by the determined refusal of the Italian Government to assent to the representation of the Vatican at the Conference, on the ground that the Issue of an invitation to the Pope would be a practical acknowledgment of his claim to temporal sovereignty. The objection does not seem an unreasonable one from the point of view of these who raise it; but, on the other hand, the exclusion of the Pope—who Is known to be most anxious for his representatives to be invited—could not fail to give dire offence to the heads of certain other Roman Catholic Powers, and might quite probably bring the arrangements to an end and render the whole scheme abortive. Whether the project will survive this new drawback as well as it has hitherto survived the patronage of Mr. Stead remains to be seen.