The Royal Castle of Christianborg, Copenhagen, has been burnt down, and several important works of art, including some by Thorwaldsen, as well as the archives of the Rigsdag, have been destroyed. The castle chapel and Thorwaldsen Museum have been saved.
The Clarendon Press is about to publish a volume of York Mystery Plays, printed for the first time from a MS. in the Ashburnham collection. The book, which will contain notes and a glossary, is edited by Mr. Toulmin Smith.
The Emperor of Austria has presented to the Royal Library at Vienna a collection of ancient Arabic literature, comprising 1,600 works in 1,052 volumes. The oldest of these MSS. dates from 1058 A.D., or earlier, and is called the “Kitab Elfelahe,” or book of agriculture.
The new apse of the Basilica of St. John Lateran at Rome and the prolongation of the portico of Sixtus IV. are approaching completion; and the decorations of the Hall of the Candelabra in the Vatican sculpture gallery are finished.
Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., are on the point of publishing an exhaustive treatise on the Violin, by Mr. Ed. Heron-Allen, author of “The Ancestry of the Violin,” “Violin-making, as it was, and is,” &c. The work will be profusely illustrated.
A “History of England under Henry IV.,” by Mr. James Hamilton Wylie, Inspector of Schools, will shortly be published by Messrs. Longmans; and “A Study of Anne Boleyn,” by Herr Paul Friedmann, is announced for publication by Messrs. Macmillan.
Dr. Humann has been appointed Abtheilungs-Director at the Royal Museum in Berlin, which he has done so much to enrich. The excavator of Pergamus is working at Nemruddagh, and his official position has no conditions of residence attached to it.
The front of the Curfew Tower, the most ancient portion of Windsor Castle, is being refaced with the “Neath stone.” The new masonry is being carefully built up under the supervision of Mr. R. Howe, Clerk of the Works at the Castle.
The literary property in letters—that is, the right to publish copies of them—remains in all cases in the writer. This was decided as long ago as 1741, in “Pope v. Curll, 2 Atk. 342,” when the poet obtained at the hands of Lord Hardwick an injunction against the publisher who proposed to print some of Pope’s letters.—Law Times.
The bicentenary of Corneille was celebrated with great éclat on Saturday, October 11, by the town of Rouen, where he was born in 1606, and died in 1684. The Academy was represented on the occasion by MM. Dumas and Sully-Prudhomme, the former of whom delivered an oration in honour of the dramatist and poet.