His Contemporaries created a sention and naturally brought a good eal of abuse on Hunt's head. It conLined an ill-timed and indiscreet atick on Byron, who had but recently ied and therefore could not defend imself.

But the book is interesting; it conains much about other people and it orms the germ of his entirely admira›le Autobiography, in which Hunt's ›itter resentment at his treatment by Byron disappears. Age and sorrows had mellowed his outlook on life and he had lived to regret his picture of Byron, although at the time of its publication he thought it was justifiable.

The Autobiography as we now have it, for he had just completed its revision for a second edition at the time of his death, is one of the best books of its kind in the English language. Few authors have an opportunity, even if they have the inclination, to rewrite their books, but Hunt had that opportunity and used it to the full. Purple patches in the Autobiography do not abound, but there are numerous passages in the book that linger in the memory. The descriptions of his school life and early days stand out, as does also the account of his imprisonment in Surrey jail, of the little garden in the yard, and of his room with its bright wall-paper of trellised roses, the books, the busts, and the piano, and of Charles Lamb's remark that such a room could not exist this side of fairyland.

The most memorable chapter perhaps is that which contains the account of the burning of Shelley's body on the shore of the Mediterranean. Shelley's death, indeed, was the great tragedy of Hunt's life, but the memory of his friend remained for the rest of his life his most treasured possession. Among the benefits that life had bestowed upon

him he used to name as the greatest that he had known Shelley.

Of his literary criticism there is no more characteristic piece of work, with its merits and its faults, than, to give its full title, his Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from the English Poets, illustrative of those first requisites of their art; with markings of their best passages, critical notices of the writers, and an essay in answer to the question, 'What is Poetry?' The selection is well made but for the unaccountable omission of Wordsworth- and the criticisms are not only sound but in some instances acute.

There were few things that Hunt loved better than to compile books of extracts and quotations; but he was never satisfied with quotations alone he gave something of his own by way of comment that was usually worthy of his subject. His method, however, of emphasizing his favorite passages by means of italic type was intolerable, and his essay in answer to the question, 'What is Poetry?' though long enough, is still far of the mark. How many before and since Hunt have attempted this definition. Even Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge tried, but has a satisfactory definition of Poetry ever been arrived at?

Hunt did produce one kind of book which has never probably been done, or at least not as successfully, by others: The Town and The Old Court Suburb. Chronicle histories of London streets, with biographical sketches of the notable people who lived in them, these books have a place of their own. But the London and Kensington of Hunt's day were very different places compared with what they are to-day. They are chronicles of the past and admirable books for all who love to dip into such things.

'POLUPHLOISBOISTEROUS HOMER

THE most profitable pages for leisurely browsing in all the English press are the two devoted to correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement. They are quite unlike the correspondent columns of other periodicals. Here all is peace. Mr. Pro Bono Publico never takes his pen in hand. In these peaceful columns the wrath of Mr. Constant Reader is never heard. But here scholars and literary folk discuss such alluring subjects as 'Fawkes's "Brown Jug,"' 'Mark Pattison on Milton,' 'Sir Walter Scott and Terence,' or 'An Unrecorded Poet.'

Quite the best of the recent contributors is Mr. G. H. Hallam, who prints some scattered bits of classical persiflage which he says 'have floated down through the years incerto auctore.' The real author, in spite of some dispute, appears to be J. D. Lester.

The first of the ditties relates to
'poluphloisboisterous Homer':
Poluphloisboisterous Homer of old
Dropped all his augments into the sea,
Though he often politely but firmly was told
Perfect imperfects begin with an e.

The Bard replied with a menacing air,
'What the Digamma does anyone care!'
And he sat and he sang by the wine-dark sea
A book or two more of his Odyssee.

The letter Digamma has long been the cause of much tearing of hair among schoolboys reading Homer, but it remained for this poet to make it into an oath on its own account.

Other verses relate to another plague of studious youth, the grandfather of all historians:

Herodotus! Herodotus!

You could not spell, you ancient cuss.
The priests of Egypt gammoned you:
It was not very hard to do,

I do not think you'll gammon us,
Herodotus! Herodotus!

and still another to his most distinguished follower:

Thucydides, 't is not with ease
We Anglicise your μèvs and dès,
And scan your crabbed histories.
O, had that Alexandrine fire
Consumed your suggraphies entire,
I think we should have bless'd that pyre,
Thucydides, M.A., Esquire.

The author, Joseph Dunn Lester, was a schoolboy with Mr. Hallam at Shrewsbury School, from which he went on to Oxford, where he became a Scholar of Jesus College. In 1865 he joined the staff of Wellington College, where he died ten years later. A colleague there describes him thus: 'He was a little Welshman with a round face, in the midst of which was planted a little peaky nose, which always supported a pair of spectacles. He was known to us as "Jimmy," was a fellow of infinite jest, and beyond that a poet' just the kind of man to write verses like these!

FINNISH MUSIC IN ITALY

THE name of Sibelius was first heard in Italy with his two pieces, "The Swan of Tuonela,' and 'A Saga,' according to a writer in La Tribuna, of Rome. Otherwise the northern composer was an almost unknown, mysterious product of 'the region of a thousand lakes.' They thought of him as a magician of the northern forests, long-haired and of mysterious habits, standing upon the shore of a cold lake when inspiration visited him, and chanting his creations to the skies. He came to Italy, however, and proved to be a gentleman of the usual European appearance, without a beard, with signs of imminent baldness upon his cranium, and with the quiet eyes of the happy father of a family.

'My music,' he told us in the course of an interview, 'is not exactly folklore. I never used the popular melodies of Finland. I did compose melodies in our national style; but they came from my own brain, or rather from my ardent patriot's heart.'

'So that you may be said to follow the example of Mussorgski rather than that of Grieg?'

'Yes. I imbibed the native music and legends of my country and then I sang as it pleased me, often inspired by the Kalevala, our folklore cycle,

that inexhaustible mine of creative emotion for every Finnish artist who is not spoiled by exoticism. . . . Because we do have such artists, especially among the younger ones, who display a pernicious tendency to internationalism. Debussy is a conqueror. Richard Strauss, Stravinski, and Schönberg have followers, too, but not as many as Claude Debussy.'

Jean Sibelius then spoke of the most prominent musicians of Finland to-day who did not suffer from 'exoticism'Palmgren, Jarnefelt, Mericanto, and Melartin, the Director of the Finnish Conservatory of Music in Helsingfors, an institution that counts about a thousand students.

"They study with fervor in all branches of music. Our younger generation of musicians is more inclined toward symphony than opera. At Helsingfors operatic spectacles are rare, but we possess a symphony orchestra of excellent artists.'

The composer's gaze rested upon the panorama of Rome, and he remembered that in his own country people were still looking out upon vast sheets of snow while in Italy it was almost summertime.

'How cold is it there usually in winter?' he was asked.

'During the winter we have mostly a steady temperature of about twenty

five degrees below zero (thirteen belo zero Fahrenheit), and once it reached forty below zero (the same as forty below zero Fahrenheit). For any warmth, in our country, you have to revert to your home and hearth — to your art.'

Sibelius is Finland's foremost na tional bard; but he is also admired abroad as one who evokes the glories of a land of singular northern beauty abounding in ancient sagas of savage warriors.

THE FREEING OF RHYTHM

IVAN VYSHNEGRADSKI prefaces an article in Nakanune with a quotation from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathus tra: 'Arise. Let us kill the spirit of heaviness.' He declares that the revo lutionary tendency in music would not be such if it demanded only the new division of tones into quarters and thirds, and the division of the whole scale into entirely new intervals numbering eighteen, twenty, and so forth. But the two fundamental elements of the musical sound are its pitch and its duration. Division of the scale affects only the quality of pitch. Rhythm has to do with duration and rhythm is also to be revolutionized.

What is rhythm? It is the primary, simple, creative movement whose freedom is the reverse of momentum. A wheel set in motion tends to revolve eternally at the same rate. If a free creative force governs its motion it may at any moment interrupt its inertia. Some of these changes of movement can be reduced to mathematical formulæ. But the most complicated of such formulæ, as for instance those which express the movement of different corresponding parts of a machine, do not exhaust the realm of rhythm. Quite the opposite: it is only

The whole subsequent history of music is a continuous struggle for emancipation from other arts, even during the so-called 'golden age' of music when, hardly emerging from slavery to word, music became a slave to dance- that is, to mechanical movement in space. Not to speak of the rondo, even large works like the suite and the sonata have dance-forms for their foundation; and some people even to-day think that these are the only possible bases for composition. Later, in the nineteenth century, free rhythm begins to awaken in the so-called 'romantic' music, which emancipates itself from dance but again comes under a strong influence of word, as in the symphonic poems of Liszt and Berlioz and the music drama

AUTOGRAPHS OF MODERN FRENCH
WRITERS

THE prospective sale at auction of the autograph collection of the late Robert de Montesquiou has attracted great interest in Paris in April. The collection consists mainly of letters by celebrated writers, most of which contain valuable information on literary history and the lives of contemporary authors.

There are sixty-eight letters and two autograph poems by Paul Verlaine, one hundred and fifty letters and autograph poems by Madame DesbordesValmore, and two hundred and sixty letters, together with two manuscript articles, by Marcel Proust, who recently died. There are autographs of Balzac, Banville, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Anatole France, Théophile Gautier, Victor and Georges Hugo, and Pierre Loti. There are also autograph letters by Stéphane Mallarmé, Frédéric Mistral, Jean Richepin, and Armand Silvestre, and one hundred and fifty letters written by Anatole France to members of his family and friends.

Besides the manuscript poems written by Madame Desbordes-Valmore, there is also a sonnet by Sully-Prudhomme, dedicated to her.