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IN the good number with which the Cornhill begins this year, Mr. John Gore prints some letters of Byron's to Lady Hardy-wife of Nelson's Hardy and later Lady Seaford, who was a distant cousin of the poet's. The letters, five in number, have not been printed before, with the exception of excerpts from two of them which appear in Moore's Life'; they are on all accounts interesting and particularly so in that the last of them reveals to whom "When we two parted" was addressed, and adds to the verses two which had been withheld. Lady Frances Webster, as Miss Mayne had conjectured, is the heroine. To recall the circumstances of Byron's pursuit of her is to revive astonishment that he I could have found it in him to address her in such terms, and yet have made of them the poignant and beautiful thing that they are. There is something in Mr. Gore's concluding contention that, though it is better that we should know the poem was inspired by Lady Frances instead of putting it down, as has been done, to Augusta Leigh, it would have been better never to have penetrated its origin. Mr. Fisher's address on the Political Novel, given to the Oxford Branch of the English Association, is a pleasant, readable analysis of the qualities, so curiously dissimilar, of Disraeli and Trollope. In the day of those novelists the idea of a political romance destitute of love interest would have been far too violent an innovation . . . To the present In generation politics are more poignant. the spring of 1923 all Berlin flocked to a play on the dismissal of Bismarck ('Die Entlassung') which contained no love interest at all, and only one female character, and that an old lady who played an inconsiderable rôle. Yet the excitement was immense. When Bismarck remonstrates with the young Kaiser for abandoning the Russian for the Austrian alliance, and closes his speech with the remark, 'Then, sire, it is a war on two fronts,' the whole audience shivered with emotion." Instead of making the too obvious allusion backward to the Athenians, Mr. Fisher looks forward, to a possible future when " some lady member of this company, after a successful Parliamentary career, will capture the reading public with a novel from which all motives of an amatory and even of a private character have been artfully expunged.' But is a novel without love interest, even now, absolutely unknown? The Reminiscences of a Harrow MasterMr. C. F. H. Mayo which begin in this number, are sure to be widely enjoyed. THERE is a delightful article in the Janu are ary Connoisseur by Miss Villiers Clive on Porcelain Tulips. These are very rare. About twenty years ago they were enthusiastically collected, but by now collectors beginning to abandon hope of adding to their collections, for the few specimens ever made seem all to have been found and seized on. They are not a product of the early potteries. Coalport, Rockingham and Derby made them, and there are many Staffordshire examples in china and earthenware. The eight illustrations given are fascinating, and will doubtless set people off on the quest of these pretty objects. Something of their history would be welcome. known? about A How old is the earliest specimen Does the idea itself date only from twenty-five years ago? PARAGRAPH in the Italian Mail, headed The Duce's Generosity,' is interesting both as a gesture of the Duce's, and as illustration of more than one |