Mr. Ouseley Pampfield, who has been recuperating at Buxton after spraining his ankle while getting out of his magnificent motor, is now seeing his new volume of poems through the press. Under the arresting title of The Soul of a Passivist they will shortly be published by the firm of Coddler and Slack.
The Jimmisons Again.
The Long Lanes will shortly publish a new "Jimmison" novel, The Factota. The heroine is a young lady enamoured of the doctrine of the economic independence of women. She enters a Draper's Emporium in Manchester and works her way up to the post of manager, but heads a strike of the work-girls. The claims of romance, however, are not overlooked, for in the long run Retta Carboy—for that is her charming name—wins the hand and heart of the junior partner's chauffeur, who turns out to be son of the Earl of Ancoats. The scene in which the Rolls-Royce, frightened by the sight of some Highland cattle, executes a cross-cut counter-rocking skid, is one of the finest things the Jimmisons have ever done.
Armageddon in the Making.
Governesses, so long the butt of unkindly satire, have at last come by their own. Miss Bertha Bowlong, who was governess to the Kaiser in the late "sixties," is shortly about to publish her reminiscences of her now all-too-notorious pupil. Strange to say it never occurred to her to set them down till quite recently, nearly fifty years after the event. The book, which is now announced by the Talboys, is rich in illuminating anecdotes of the future War Lord, as well as vivid portraits of Moltke, Bismarck, Treitschke, Münchhausen, Eulenspiegel, Dudelsack and other luminaries of the Prussian capital.
The Charm of Cannibalism.
Miss Ermyntrude Stuggy (Mrs. Raymond Blott), whose extraordinary novel, The Lurid Lady, was described by Father Bernard Vaughan as the most "precipitous" book he had ever preached on, has returned to England after two years' residence among the cannibals of the Solomon Islands. Hence the title of her forthcoming volume, The Adorable Anthropophagi, which is already announced by Messrs. Hybrow and Garbidge. The contents explain why Mr. Blott has heroically preferred to remain with the cannibals.
Major Finch's Great Discovery.
Major Hector Finch, the famous Nationalist M.P., philosopher, psychologist and scholar, has made a remarkable literary discovery. It is that Johnson's Dictionary is not, as is generally supposed, the work of Ben Jonson, but of Samuel Johnson, the son of a Lichfield bookseller. This epoch-making revelation, briefly and modestly outlined in a letter to The Daily Chronicle, will be set forth in detail in a massive volume of 1,000 pages, with a portrait of the author, to be issued shortly by the House of Swallow and Gull.