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son of a peasant woman and Louis XV., should be an effective offset to Major Stobo. There was no hint of Doltaire in the Memoirs.' There could not be, nor of the plot on which the story was based, because it was all imagination. Likewise, there was no mention of Alixe Duvarney in the Memoirs,' nor of Bigot and Mme. Cournal and all the others. They, too, when not characters, of the imagination, were lifted out of the history of the time; but the first germ of the story came from The Memoirs of Robert Stobo,' and when 'The Seats of the Mighty' was first published in the Atlantic Monthly the subtitle contained these words: Being the Memoirs of Captain Robert Stobo, sometime an officer in the Virginia Regiment, and afterward of Amherst's Regiment.'

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'The title of the book was for long a trouble to me. Months went by before I could find what I wanted. Scores of titles occurred to me, but each was rejected. At last, one day when I was being visited by Grant Richards, since then a London publisher but at that time a writer who had come to interview me for Great Thoughts, I told him of my difficulties regarding the title. I was saying that I felt the title should be, as it were, the kernel of a book. I said 'You see, it is a struggle of one simple girl against principalities and powers; it is the final conquest of the good over the great. In other words, the book will be an illustration of the text: "He has put down the mighty from their seats, and has exalted the humble and meek." Then, like a flash, the title came-'The Seats of the Mighty.'"

"The Battle of the Strong" was written, Sir Gilbert says, as a protest and a deliver

ance.

"For seven years I had written continuously of Canada, though some short stories of South Sea life, and the novel 'Mrs. Falchion' had during that time issued from my pen. It looked as though I should be writing of the far north all my life. Editors had begun to take that view; but from the start it had never been my view. Even when writing Pierre and His People' I was determined that I should not be

confined in one field; some other men have

cabined, cribbed, and that I should not, as done, wind in upon myself, until at last each succeeding book would be but a variation of some previous book, and I should end by imitating myself, become the sacrifice to the god of the pinhole.

“I was warned not to break away from Canada; but all my life I had been warned, and all my life I had followed my own convictions. I would rather not have written another word than be corralled, bitted, saddled, and ridden by that heartless broncho buster the public, which wants a man who has once pleased it to do the same thing under the fret of whip and spur forever. When I went to the Island of Jersey in 1897 it was to shake myself free of what might become a mere obsession. . . . Whatever may be thought of 'The Battle of the Strong,' I have not yet met a Jerseyman who denies to it the atmosphere of the place. It could hardly have lacked it, for there were twenty people, deeply intelligent, immensely interested in my design, and they were of Jersey families which had been there for centuries. They helped me, they fed me with dialect, with local details, with memories, with old letters, with diaries of their forebears until if I had gone wrong it would have been through lack of skill in handling my material. I do not think I went wrong, though I believe that I could construct the book more effectively if I had to do it again. Yet there is something in looseness of construction which gives an air of naturalness; and it may be that this very looseness which I notice in The Battle of the Strong' has had something to do with giving it such a great circle of readers, though this may appear paradoxical."

He says of "The Weavers": "When I turn over the hundreds of pages of this book I have a feeling that I am looking upon something for which I have no particular responsibility, though it has a strange contour of familiarity. That distance between himself and his work which immediately begins to grow as soon as a book leaves the author's hands for those of the public is a thing which I suppose must come to one who produces a thing of the imagi

nation. It is no doubt due to the fact that every work of art which has individuality and real likeness to the scenes and character it is intended to depict is done in a kind of trance. The author, in effect, self-hypnotizes himself, has created an atmosphere which is separate and apart from that of his daily surroundings, but by virtue of his imagination becomes absorbed in that atmosphere. When the book is finished and it goes forth, when the imagination is relaxed and the concentration of the mind is withdrawn the atmosphere disappears, and so one experiences what I feel when I take up 'The Weavers,' and in a sense wonder how it was done.

Critics and readers have endeavored to identify the main characteristics of The Weavers' with figures in Anglo-Egyptian and official public life. David Claridge, was, however, a creature of the imagination. It has been said that he was drawn from General Gordon. I am not conscious of having taken Gordon for David's prototype, though as I was saturated with all that had been written about Gordon there is no doubt that something of that great man may have found its way into the character of David Claridge. The true origin of David Claridge, however, may be found in a short story callea All the World's Mad,' in 'Donovan Pasha,' which was originally published by Lady Randolph Churchill in an ambitious defunct magazine called the Anglo-Saxon Review. The truth is that David Claridge had his origin in a fairly close understanding of and interest in Quaker life. I had Quaker relatives through the marriage of a connection of my mother, and the original Ben Claridge, the uncle of David, is still alive, a very old man, but who appealed to me in my boyhood days, and who wore the broad brim and the straight preacher-like coat of the old-fashioned Quaker. The grandmother of my wife was also a Quaker, and used the thee' and 'thou' until the day of her death."

"When Valmond Came to Pontiac " stands alone, says the author, being like nothing else he ever wrote, an historical fantasy.

“The manuscript of the book was com

plete within four weeks. It possessed me. I wrote night and day. There were times when I went to bed and, unable to sleep, I would get up at two o'clock or three o'clock in the morning and write till breakfast time. A couple of hours' walk after breakfast and I would write again until nearly two o'clock, then luncheon; a couple of hours in the open air and I would again write till eight o'clock in the evening. The world was shut out. I moved in a dream. The book was begun at Hot Springs. in Virginia, in the annex to the old Hct Springs Hotel. I could not write in the hotel itself, so I went to the annex and in the big building — in the early springtime 1 worked night and day. There was no one else in the place except the old negro caretaker and his wife. Four-fifths of the book was written in three weeks there. Then I went to New York and at the Lotos Club, where I had a room, I finished it - but no, not quite. There were a few pages of the book to do when I went for my walk in Fiith avenue one afternoon. I could not shake the thing off, the last pages demanded to be written. The sermon which the old cure was preaching on Valmond's death was running in my head. I could not continue my walk. Then and there I stepped. into the Windsor Hotel, which I was passing, and asked if there was a stenographer at liberty. There was. In the stenographer's office of the Windsor Hotel, with the life of a caravansery buzzing around me, I dictated the last few pages of 'When Valmond Came to Pontiac.' It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction. I had never been able to do it and have not been able to do it since, and I am glad that it is so, for I should have a fear of being. led into rhetoric and fatal fluency. It did not, however, seem to matter with this book. It wrote itself anywhere. The proofs of the first quarter of the book were in my hands before I had finished writing the last quarter.

"It took me a long time to recover from the terrific effort of that five weeks, but I never regretted those consuming fires which burned up sleep and energy and ravaged the vitality of my imagination. The

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Reading as Inspiration for Writing. Writers of the hour are sometimes heard to say that they refrain from reading overmuch lest they lose their own style or originality. But the overwhelming weight of testimony is on the side of wide reading as the strongest incentive to original writing. Every great book has looked back to literature preceding it. The Bible itself is a chain of great books, one growing naturally out of those before it. From this great example down, every great utterance on earth has been the normal outgrowth of that which was before it, pointing to the unity of all true thinking and the steady progress of human understanding in all the different lines of its activity. We find Dante giving all honor to Virgil, who is his guide through those remarkable passages that explain the intimate relation of sin and its punishment, and that were to the great poet not literalism, but a vivid symbolism. Shakspere used many plays and stories that preceded him for his plots and characters, and critics sometimes are heard to deny him the merit of originality on this account. The great "Ring" of Wagner is his interpretation of the famous German epic of the Nibelungs. Tennyson and Browning are full of old literature. Glancing again at the classics we see Virgil writing out of the tales of Homer, and all the great Greek dramatists looking to Homer for their heroes and heroines. Homer's poems were of course the gathering together of old folk-lore, and the songs of the rhapsodists who were before him It is doubtless true that to do nothing but read destroys originality of thought.

But no one can read broadly and understandingly without being enriched, prompted to thought, and awakened to more original expression. All there is of writing is the expression of thought. Whatever makes one think, then, is productive. — Christian Science Monitor.

Dramatic Action. "One of the weaknesses of most people who write and talk about dramatic subjects," says Augustus Thomas, "is that they fail to appreciate that action may be mental as well as physical. They seem to consider that the only real action is to be found when the players are excitedly rushing about the stage. But the mental revelation, the mental shock, of the man confronted with a vital problem may constitute action stronger and deeper than any mere physical activity." - New York Times.

The Slavery of Rhymes.. Some mispronunciations of to-day once enjoyed the highest standing; we must not think that Shakspere was sinning when he rhymed groin, swine. Indeed, oi, like long i (as in ice), survived regularly through the eighteenth century. When a country-woman of our time watches the kettle bile or jines the church, she has behind her Cowley's join, vine; Gray's shine, join; Pope's join, divine; Dryden's join, design; Addison's find, joined; Coleridge's joined, mind; Wordsworth's, joined, kind, and Byron's aisles, toils. Indeed, so late a writer as Bulwer gives us mind, enjoined, which sounds as dialectical as Gray's toil, smile. It is no wonder that Joel Barlow, the author of our own great typographical epic, "The Columbiad," jined join and divine. Yale Review.

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BOOK REVIEWS.

SYNONYMS, ANTONYMS, AND ASSOCIATED WORDS. By Louis A. Flemming. 619 pp. Cloth, $1.25, net. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1913. This new book of synonyms contains much material not found in other books, and it is all most conveniently arranged. The book will be a great help to any writer seeking the exact word to express his thought. Its contents are arranged in alphabetical order and in collections of synonyms, anto

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THE

PRINTER'S DICTIONARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS. By A. A. Stewart. 367 pp. Cloth, $2.00. Boston: The School of Printing, North End Union. 1912.

Connected with the North End Union of Boston is a School of Printing for apprentices, conducted under the auspices of the Boston Typothetae Board of Trade. This "Printer's Dictionary," compiled by Mr. Stewart, the instructor of the school, a handbook of definitions and information about processes of printing, with a brief glossary of terms used in book binding, has been in preparation for several years and is the work of the pupils in the school. The aim has been to compile rudimentary information for the young printer, but the result is a glossary of technical terms and a handbook of information that will be of value to any one interested in the printing art. The book is in every way creditable both to the compiler and to the seventy-five or eighty young printers by whose labors while learning it was put in type.

NAPOLEON'S CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIA ANNO 1812. By Dr. A. Rose. 212 pp. Cloth, $1.50. New York: Dr. A. Rose, 173 Lexington avenue. 1913. Dr. Rose's book is medico-historical, a medical history of the hundreds of thousands who perished from cold, hunger, fatigue, or misery in Russia in Napoleon's campaign. The book is interesting and instructive, and gives a complete concise story of the events of the ill-fated expedition.

THE GUARDIANS OF THE COLUMBIA. By John H. Williams. 144 pp. Cloth, $1.50, net; $1.66, postpaid. Tacoma, Wash. John H. Williams. 1912. More than two hundred fine illustrations, including eight in colors, add to the attractiveness of this beautiful book, which is devoted to Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helena, the Columbia River, and its great forests. "The Guardians of the Columbia" is a companion volume to "The Mountain That Was God,'" also published by Mr. Williams, which is so attractive that in less than two years 45,000 copies have been sold. More than fifty photographers have co-operated to make the pictures for the present book, and the letterpress is worthy of the illustrations. Mr. Williams is rendering a valuable service in

making better known the wonderful scenic beauties of the Pacific Northwest.

BOOKS RECEIVED:

[THE WRITER is pleased to receive for review any books about authors, authorship, language, or literary topics, or any books that would be of real value in a writer's library, such as works of reterence, history, biography, or travel. There is no space in the magazine for the review of fiction, poetry, etc. All books received will be acknowledged this heading. Selections will be made for review in the interest of THE WRITER'S readers. ] THE NEWS IN THE COUNTRY PAPER. By Charles G. Ross. 41 pp. Paper. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri. 1913.

under

LOVE LIFE OF JESUS AND MARY OF BETHANY, AND POEMS. By L. W. Jacobs. 243 pp.. Cloth. Sapulpa, Ok. : Francis Warren Jacobs.

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PRESENT TENDENCIES IN ENGLISH SPEECH. I. Leila Sprague Learned. II. Ellwood Hendrick. Atlantic for May.

INSECTS AND GREEK POETRY. Lafcadio Hearn. Atlantic for May.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Frank B. Noyes. North American Review for May.

POPULARITY IN LITERATURE. R. A. Scott-James. North American Review for May.

RECOLLECTIONS OF HENRIK IBSEN. Boilette Sontum. Bookman for May.

ROBERT ALEXANDER WASON. Book News Monthly for May.

THE COMRADES OF MAETERLINCK. Bernard Muddiman. Forum for May. ILLUMINATION

AND EYESTRAIN. Ellice M. Alger, M. D. Medical Review of Reviews for May. THE POET OF THE SIERRAS. With portrait. Case and Comment for May.

NOTE ON GUSTAV FRENSSEN. Warren Washburn Florer. Modern Language Notes for May.

A SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR METRICS. Charles W. Cobb. Modern Language Notes for May.

"JOE GARGERY AND HIS RECOLLECTIONS OF DICKENS. With portraits. T. Andrew Richards. Strand for May.

BOCCACCIO. Walter Raleigh. English Review for

May.

ROBERT COLLYER AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY. Dr. Thomas Frederick Crane. Christian Register for March 20.

MARK TWAIN HUMORIST AND PESSIMIST. Edwin Mims. Methodist Review for April.

THE AGENT, LITERARY AND DRAMATIC. "G. H. T." Author (London) for April.

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At the first annual meeting of the Authors' League officers were elected as follows President, Winston Churchill; vicepresident, Theodore Roosevelt; secretary and treasurer, Ellis Parker Butler; honorary vice-presidents, John Burroughs, Mrs. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Dr. John Grier Hibben, and Dr. William M. Sloane; councilors, Gelett Burgess, Robert W. Chambers, Hamlin Garland, Miss Ellen Glasgow, Charles Rann Kennedy, Jack London, Cleveland Moffett, Harvey J. O'Higgins, Booth Tarkington, and Miss Carolyn Wells. The league now has nearly four hundred *members.

Mary Roberts Rinehart says that she has cleared more than $100,000 on her novels and fully as much in royalties on her plays during the last seven years. The smallest amount that one of her books brought, she says, was $1,200, while the greatest amount received in royalties for any one of her stories was $50,000.

Collier's has engaged Miss Viola Roseboro as story editor. The price of the paper is now five cents a copy.

Caspar Whitney, for many years editor of the Outing Magazine, has lately become the editor of Outdoor World and Recreation.

In "A Small Boy and Others," published by the Scribners, Henry James has written the story of his boyhood.

"Jean Jacques Rousseau," by Gerhard Gran, professor of literature in the University of Kristiania, is published by the Scribners.

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The Insanity of Genius," by J. F. Nisbet, which has gone through six editions in England, is published by the Scribners.

A brief sketch, "The Newspaper," is included in the Home University Library (Holt). It is by G. Binney Dibblee, and it is chiefly concerned with the rise and development of English journalism.

“Dr. Johnson and His Circle," by John Bailey, has been added to the Home University Library.

"William Ernest Henley," a monograph by L. Cope Comford, is published by Con stable of London.

"William Morris: A Critical Study," by John Drinkwater, is published by Mitchell Kennerley, New York.

Clement Shorter has nearly completed the biography of George Borrow, on which he has been long engaged. An article on Borrow in Scotland, which he contributes to the April Fortnightly Review, forms an introduction of the biography.

"George Meredith," by Constantine Photiades, is published by the Scribners.

Smith & Elder are to publish a new life of Jane Austen, based on the memoir by J. E. Austen-Leigh, the letters published by Lord Brabourne, and other family documents, some of them never before published. The book is written by two members of Jane Austen's family, W. AustenLeigh and R. Austen-Leigh.

Collier's (New York) offers a first prize of $2,500, a second prize of $1,000, and eight prizes of $500 each for the ten best original short stories, of any length whatever from the very shortest up to 12,000 words. All manuscript must be typewritten, and all must be unsigned, with no indication that would divulge the authorship. Every manuscript must be accompanied by a plain sealed envelope, on which is inscribed the name of the story, and in which is the writer's full name and address. All manuscripts must be mailed on or before September 1. The prize money will be given in addition to the regular rates paid for the stories. There is no limit to the number of stories any writer may submit.

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