The numbers of ladies attending the King's College classes at Observatory Avenue have been very high during the term that has just ended. The entries were nearly 600, which is a larger number than has been reached since the first year, 1878, when the classes started, and the present house hardly affords room for such numbers.
It is not generally known that the Times attains its hundredth year on the 1st of January, 1885. The prevailing notion is that the year in which it was founded was 1788, the truth being that the 940th number of the journal appeared on the first day in that year. The mistake is due to confounding a change in the title with the foundation of the journal. The actual facts are set forth in an article which Mr. Fraser Rae contributes to the January number of the Nineteenth Century. Amongst other things which will attract notice in that article is a verbatim copy of the inscription on the tablets affixed in honor of the conduct of the Times in the case of Bogle v. Lawson in 1841, by a committee of bankers and merchants of the City, in the Royal Exchange, and over the entrance to the Times printing office. As these tablets are placed where the inscriptions on them cannot easily be read, and as copies of these inscriptions are not given in the works dealing with the City, the copy in the Nineteenth Century is a piece of historical information which will be novel to most readers.
The last number of Shakspeariana contains the somewhat surprising statement that Prof. Kuno Fischer is a convert to the Bacon-Shakspere theory, and will lecture upon it at Heidelberg this winter. From the same periodical we copy the following curious paragraph:—
“A very remarkable discovery has been placed on record by the Hon. Ignatius Donnelly, who claims to have proof positive that Bacon was the author of Shakspere's plays. This is accomplished by means of a cipher which Bacon twice describes, whereby one writing could be infolded and hidden in another. The words of the hidden story have a definite relation to the acts and scenes of the plays, which is determined by counting. Attracted by 'I. Henry IV.'; II., i., ii., iv., and IV., ii., in which he found the words 'Francis,' 'Bacon' (twice), 'Nicholas' (twice), 'Bacon's,' 'son,' 'master,' 'Kings,' 'exchequer,' 'St. Albans'—the name of Bacon's place of residence—and, in IV., ii., 'Francis' repeated twenty times on one page, Mr. Donnelly applied his key to it, with the following result:—Elizabeth during the Essex troubles became, as is known, incensed at the use made of the play of 'Richard II.,' in which is represented the deposition and killing of the King; and she made it one of the points of prosecution which cost Essex his head, that he had hired the company of players to which Shakspere belonged to represent it more than forty times in open streets and in tavern yards, in order to prepare the public mind for her own deposition and murder. History tells us that she caused the arrest of Haywarde, who wrote a prose narrative of the deposition of Richard II. and dedicated it to Essex, and he narrowly escaped a State prosecution. Mr. Donnelly shows that at the same time Shakspere was arrested as the author of the plays; he was threatened with the torture, and disclosed to the officers of the Crown the fact that Bacon was the real author of the plays. Bacon threw himself on the protection of his uncle, Lord Burleigh, the great Lord Treasurer, who saved him from exposure and prosecution, but revealed the truth to Elizabeth; and this is the explanation of the fact, that, as long as Elizabeth lived, she kept Bacon out of office and in poverty.”
MISCELLANY.
Some Personal Recollections of George Sand.—The recent unveiling of George Sand's statue at La Châtre has set people thinking about her afresh. At no time since “Indiana” and “Lelia” first revealed the existence of a new writer of transcendent power, has her place in French literature, and her influence on the social problems of the time, and the question whether her artistic creations will or will not live, been canvassed with more energy than during the past few weeks. Some personal recollections of George Sand given by Mrs. Ellis, the authoress of “Sylvestra,” may therefore be of interest: “Above twenty years ago,” writes Mrs. Ellis, “I spent three days in a French hotel (at Tours) with George Sand, without knowing who she was. She puzzled me all the time, and had in person something of the same effect on me that her character—attractive and repulsive—has still. She sat opposite me at a narrow table d'hôte—a tall, large, strongly-built woman, with features in proportion to her size. Her eyes were fine, but her force of appearance was rather physical than intellectual. It must have been the brain beneath the strong features which teased me as it did, to make out to myself who she could be. She was mature, but in no decline of force, massive, grave, and restful, with nothing Gallic about her. The dark hair, eyes, and tint might have belonged to Italy or Spain, quite as well as to France, and the bearing, better. Her dress might have been called 'dowdy.' It was of the type of the travelling Englishwoman, as French eyes see it, rather than French. I think her 'robe' was brown, which did not become her at all. Crimson would have suited her. She wore an ugly, large-brimmed, straw hat, with broad lace falling over the brim, at a time when Frenchwomen had hardly begun to wear hats, and—if my memory does not err—she wore it at dinner. Her companion was an elderly and feeble man, seemingly more than seventy. There was nothing in the appearance of the couple (viewing them as married folk) unlike that of many other French pairs, when, as is so often the case, the man 'ranges' himself at forty by the side of a young lady of half his years. My perplexing neighbor understood what I said to my husband in English, and offered me some little courteous attentions. There was no real speech between us. If I had known it was George Sand, I believe that I should not have spoken more, as I had not long before read some unpleasing remarks in her autobiography on the way in which she was annoyed by 'les Anglaises,' and on the 'étranges sifflements' which they introduced into the fine French tongue! She and I were the only two women in the hotel who ever went into a sort of reading-room adjoining the house to look at the newspapers. I had nearly settled with myself that she was a lady country squire, such as I used to see drive into Tours on market days, when one morning, on going, as I used to do, to the Imperial library, to draw from old illuminated MSS., my friend, the librarian, M. d'Orange, said to me, 'Madame, do you know that you have George Sand in your hotel?' When I went back, she had just gone with the gentleman who had lent her his name to travel with, for she was entered as his 'Comtesse' in the book of the hotel. He was a Radical Deputy. I told my lively landlady, who declared that M. d'Orange 'n'en savait rien,' and opened her book to show me the names of M. le Comte and Madame la Comtesse So-and-So. Then she said, 'If it was George Sand,' her books, 'ma foi,' of which she had read one or two—instancing a couple of the best—were not 'grande chose.' When I got back to England, I looked at a fine lithographed portrait of George Sand, and saw it was the woman. Perhaps it was for the best that I had not known who she was, as my impression, which is still vivid, remains of her as she seemed, and not such as my fancy would at once have set to work to make her out. Thinking of her afterward, I was reminded of that passage in her autobiography in which she tells how, in a moment of misery, she tested her own strength by lifting a large heavy stone, and said to herself in despair, 'And I may have to live forty years!' Also I thought of Alfred de Musset's taunting her—she never forgot it—with having no esprit. Of 'esprit Gallois' she seems to have had little. The Northern races had the uppermost in her making, I should say. I have a notion that the Königsmarks were Pomeranian—of the Bismarck build—and had she not the blood of the Counts Horn? I forget. However, Marshal Saxe spoke for himself in her. Mr. Hamerton says that an intense desire to study character had its strong share in her illicit liaisons with poets, musicians, lawyers, novelists, etc., all being men above the common run. But here, again, I cannot help thinking that race descent from Augustus II. of Saxony and Aurore de Königsmark counted for much. Her genuine feeling for the poor, and a sort of homely motherliness, seem to have made her greatly loved by the Berry people.“—Spectator.