Farmer's little known César-Napoléon Gaillard à la conquête de l'Amérique. It is published by Payot.

MESSRS. DENT announce that 'Q' is compiling an anthology of literature, from Chaucer to the present time, concerned with 'Ships and the Sea.' This volume is to be one of the educational series known as The Kings' Treasuries reof Literature.

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Garrick and Chippendale

A CURIOUS old account book,* of unusual interest to admirers of David Garrick and Chippendale, the designer, has just been published by the Victoria and Albert Museum. To begin with, it furnishes us with a very precise deascription of an elegantly appointed gentleman's house of the seventeen seventies. Garrick's drawing-room contained '12 very neat cary'd Cabreole arm'd Chairs, Japan'd Green and white, stuff'd,and cover'd with Green silk Damask and finish'd with Gilt Nails' (£48 the set); '2 Burjairs (phonetic spelling of "bergères") Japan'd in the same manner, stuff'd in linnen,' and a fine feather Cushion (£5 apiece); 'a large Carv'd Sofa to match the chairs,' and covered with the same green damask; '2 very large Peer Glasses in neat Carv'd Frames gilt in Burnish'd Gold Complete' (£138 the pair); another glass with a very large 'Rich Carv'd Gilt Frame'; '2 Small very neat commodes curiously inlaid with fine woods' (£44 the pair); 'A very large commode of silverwood with folding Doors, etc., curiously inlaid with various fine woods as the others' (£40); and a pair of Pembroke tables in silverwood, inlaid to match the commodes. The walls were papered and finished with '440 feet neat Carv'd Leaf Border gilt in Burnish'd Gold.' The bell-pulls

*Accounts of Chippendale, Haig & Co., for the furnishing of David Garrick's House in the Adelphi. (Victoria and Albert Museum. 2s. net.)

were ornamented with 'rich Silk Tossells.' The principal bedroom contained a remarkable piece of furniture, to wit, 'a very large Inlaid Case of Fustick (a light yellow wood) and fine Black Rosewood with Sundry other ornaments curiously Inlaid with various fine woods, the middle part to hold a Bed, the Ends for Shelves, Cloakpins, Night Tables, etc., enclosed with Doors, very neat Shap'd Doors with Carv'd ornaments hung with pin hinges on sliding parts, Glaz'd with looking Glasses and back'd with mahogany, very neat carv'd cornice Japan'd to match the Fustick Wood, etc.' The cost of this portmanteau bed and wardrobe was £65 10s., and a very large inlaid press of the same design is priced at a pound more. There are four very neat chairs japanned green and white to match the drawing-room chairs, and two more of the 'Burjairs.' The room is hung with Garrick's 'own India Paper.' Garrick's total bill for the furnishing of Five Adelphi Terrace amounted to £931 9s. 32d. 'He now lives rather as a prince than as an actor his table, his equipage, and manner of living are all the most expensive and equal to those of a nobleman.'

But these old bills are interesting for the light they incidentally throw on Chippendale. The firm of Chippendale undertakes every kind of odd job in Garrick's house, from paper-hanging and porterage to 'repairing a hand organ broke by a poor Boy - by Mrs. Garrick's orders.' It is evident, Mr. Brackett points out in his introductory comments on the Garrick accounts, that Chippendale, though in his younger days a woodcarver and an artist, had after about 1760 developed into a general house furnisher and upholsterer, whose work showed no distinctive style or character, but was dominated by the architect or client who employed him.' The green and

white japanned furniture has obviously nothing to do with what we ordinarily think of as characteristic 'Chippendale' work. 'By about 1765 Chippendale had abandoned the familiar mahogany designs found in the Director (his trade circular, The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director), and was designing inlaid and painted pieces which bore no resemblance in form nor decoration to the examples popularly associated with his name.'

L'Amoureuse Aventure

Books by French authors which have to do with life in Great Britain are fairly rare. Mr. J. H. Rosny, the latest author to try the experiment, differs from his fellows in knowing England well. His recent book L'Amoureuse Aventure is the tale of a

young Englishman who goes to live in

the London slums. The novel has been very favorably noticed by the French press. It is issued by Flammarion.

The Mayflower Sailors' Hostel

ON September 6, the Mayflower Sailors' Hostel was opened at Plymouth, England, under the auspices of the British and Foreign Sailors' Society. The committee feel that there cannot be a more fitting memorial to the Pilgrim Fathers, or to the sailors who bravely encountered such risks during the war, than the scheme here outlined, and hope for cordial support from every sailor-man and from every lover of ships and the sea. Contributions may be sent to Lovell R. Dunstan, Esq., The Guildhall, Plymouth, England, or to the Arts and Letters department of the LIVING AGE.

London's Grand Guignol LONDON'S Grand Guignol, of which we have already spoken, has opened its doors. The repertoire, as a whole,

has been rather severely dealt with, probably with justice. One genuine Parisian Grand Guingol piece, however, has met with some favor. It is entitled The Hand of Death and its authors, MM. André de Lorde and Alfred Binet, have contrived it with very great skill. They have packed more of the horrific into it than was packed by the bloodiest of the Elizabethans into his most gruesome work, but they have omitted one element which the Elizabethans never omitted the element of beauty. There is, indeed, much display of paternal love for a daughter in the piece, but it is displayed less as natural affection than as a mania. Professor Charrier engages in scientific research. He asserts that men die because they have not the courage to resist Death, and he suggests vaguely that it may be possible utterly to defeat Death. If only the flow of blood to the brain can be maintained, man need not die, and he asserts that doctors should concentrate upon the heart. He has invented an electrical apparatus for stimulating the heart's action, and, when the play begins, is negotiating with the public executioner to be allowed to make an experiment on the body of a criminal after death on the guillotine. So far, his experiments have been made on persons with worn or diseased organs; he now desires to experiment on a person with healthy organs!

When he has ended his arrangements with M. Paris, news comes that his daughter has been injured in a motor accident. She dies, and the frantic father has his opportunity immedi ately of experimenting with a healthy person who has died from syncope, and, in full view of the audience, he performs an operation on the dead girl, making an incision and connecting the electrical apparatus with her heart. The operation takes place during a violent storm, and at first seems un

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Just the thing, evidently, to see when nervous.

A Description of Paul Dardé THE general setting of this story is a village named Soubés, which, in stragangling fashion, descends a great road, hard and white, and shaded by magnificent plane trees. A tiny rivulet runs parallel to the route, leading to a plateau in the Cévennes, a region best known to Englishmen through Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey. Interest centres on the inhabitants of a very small cottage with three ogival openings that give on to a chalk-blanched terrace. In front of the door, with its sprimitive latch, are two young people. Both are healthy and happy, content with their life and humble abode. She is a beautiful young woman of twenty years, well made and merry, her full oval face and nut-brown eyes framed by glistening hair gathered charmingly behind. The man is a Herculean 'Devil,' says M. Joseph Gautier. His sleeves are rolled up, a shirt unbuttoned discloses a neck like a bull's, and a chest muscular and hairy. Small chestnut-colored eyes smile under thick brows set wide apart, large fleshy lips gleam red, like dog-rose berries, in a long black beard with tawny streaks, giving it the appearance of a bush in early Something undisciplined, savage, accentuates this mighty figure

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clad in wide blue pantaloons reaching to huge boots that enclose naked feet. Pick in hand, he models an enormous block of stone with astonishing force and surety.

Chu Chin Chow

AT His Majesty's Theatre Chu Chin Chow begins its fifth year! St. John Ervine writes winged words to the Observer.

'I have been invited to rejoice because Chu Chin Chow began the fifth year of its performance on Tuesday, but I see no occasion for rejoicing or for anything but the profoundest melancholy. Sir Herbert Tree was not a great actor, but he was a great manager, and he associated his beautiful theatre with a very fine tradition. That tradition has disappeared. Mr. Oscar Asche, the best Petruchio and Claudius of our time, and Miss Lily Brayton, the best Ophelia and Katharina of our time, were trained in the honorable tradition of the Bensonians. Can any lover of the theatre rejoice in the fact that His Majesty's Theatre has been occupied for four years by a rubbishy pantomime in which two distinguished players have completely submerged their great gifts? When I am told that the mannequins will be entirely redressed to celebrate this event, I am not thrilled. When I am informed that two new camels, specially imported, will be introduced into the cast, I can only answer that a whole camel corps would not compensate playgoers for the fact that during four years they have not seen Mr. Asche or Miss Brayton in plays worthy of them. May we not hope that they will remember their pre-war records and speedily set about recovering them?'

IN the spring of 1763, a strange figure was seen in the streets of London. Short, strongly marked with smallpox, spectacles on his nose, an umbrella under his arm, an open map and compass in one hand, in the other a big eartrumpet of white metal, M. Charles Marie de la Condamine, who had traveled over much of Europe and spent many years in South America, came, at the age of sixty-two, to explore England. The time for his journey was not well chosen, for scarcely a year had elapsed since the Peace of Paris had put an end to the Seven Years' War, and though a good deal of intercourse was going on between the Grand monde of both countries - at Paris in August there were no fewer than five English Duchesses- the lower classes were still full of the rooted dislike of foreigners that Giordano Bruno recorded at the end of the seventeenth century. 'His indefatigable curiosity about everything and together with his deafness sometimes make him very tiresome'; and Baretti, two hundred years later, declared that the people were 'irrespettevole, incivile, rizza, rustica, selvatica e male allevata.'

It is not to be wondered at therefore that the queer figure of M. de la Condamine should have been received with anything but respect in the streets. He knew hardly any English, but that did not prevent him from asking interminable questions, and the remarks which the street boys shouted down his ear-trumpet, some of which he

seems to have noted down carefully, were the reverse of complimentary. As a member of the French Academy, he had corresponded with various English savants, especially with Matthew Maty, the Librarian of the British Museum, whom Dr. Johnson used to call 'the little black dog,' but none of his correspondents seems to have welcomed his arrival in England. Grimm, in whose correspondence his name frequently occurs, acknowledged that and that he was nicknamed 'le syndic des insupportables'; and if Grimm, who knew and esteemed him, could say this, there is some excuse for Horace Walpole's ignoring the introduction which he brought from Count Lorenzi. "To tell the truth,' Walpole wrote to Mann, 'La Condamine is absurdity itself.' But it was not only the absurd appearance which the explorer presented in the streets of London which led (according to Grimm) to his being burlesqued on the English stage - that caused society to fight shy of him. On his arrival in London he took lodgings 'in Suffolk Street, at a Milliner's, at the sign of the Golden Angel.' What precisely happened here on the night of May 26 it is hard to decide, for the evidence is contradictory. Walpole, writing to Mann a month later, says that La Condamine

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has had a quarrel with his landlady, whose lodgers being disturbed by La Condamine's servant being obliged to bawl to him, as he is deaf, wanted to get rid of him. He would not budge; she dressed two chairmen for bailiffs to force him out. The next day he published an address to the

people of England, in the newspaper, informing them that they are the most savage nation in or out of Europe.

The address, which appeared in Lloyd's Evening Post for June 1-3, from whence it found its way into the Gazette de France, is a very curious document. 'M. de la Condamine, Knight of St. Lazare, one of the forty of the French Academy, Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, and of almost all the Academies in Europe, particularly for above fifteen years Fellow of the Royal Society of London,' relates how returning home at nine o'clock in the evening, he perceived that he was followed by two men very shabbily dressed, who entered his room, and presented him with a paper,

threatening him by word and gesture, making a sign for him to follow them. Let any one put himself in the place of a stranger, who has the honor to be personally known to many of the first nobility and persons of distinction in London, and who that very day was to have been presented to His Britannick Majesty . . . at finding himself seized by brutal officers, whose language he did not understand, and threatened by them to be dragged to prison.

...

But he guessed that it was a farce got up by his landlady in order to install another lodger, so he wrote to the 'Minister charged with the affairs of France' (none other than the celebrated Chevalier d'Eon) and gave the brutal officers' a florin to carry the letter, which was never delivered according to the direction.'

The person to whom this adventure has happened has traveled to Algiers, to Tunis, to Tripoli, in Barbary, in Egypt, in Palestine, in Syria, in Carmania, to Constantinople, upon the banks of the Black Sea; he travers'd above a thousand leagues in America, through countries uninhabited but by savages, without having ever experienced such ill treatment as he has met with at London.

As Walpole says, this is 'pretty near truth; and yet I would never have abused the Iroquois to their faces in

one of their own Gazettes.' The sequel of this adventure is a little difficult to make out. According to La Condamine's own account, the Chevalier d'Eon advised him to take no further steps, but handed his 'Address to the English Nation' to John Wilkes, through whom it appeared in the Evening Post, though (as La Condamine says) in an altered form. He then appealed to Sir John Fielding, the magistrate, 'vénérable vieillard, l'un des plus anciens et le doyen des juges de paix, homme très considéré,' who also advised silence, which this time the offended traveler followed, cut short his visit to England, and soon after returned to France. But his address did not remain unanswered, for a reply appeared in the Evening Post of June 15-17.

According to this version of the story, La Condamine was not returning home on May 26, but 'had been in his chamber long before the two men. entered it, when he was found amusing himself with the philosophical society of two fair nymphs, who with more propriety might be styled two Graces rather than two Virtues.' The paper presented to him 'was nothing more than a warrant granted by Mr. Justice Garnon upon the deposition of a servant maid belonging to the house, who had made oath . that M. Condamine had the day before drawn his penknife upon her, and had put her in fear of her life.' The reply ends thus:

The mistress of the house where M. Condamine lodged is extremely glad to have got rid of so troublesome a guest, and wishes him a very good journey to Tripoli, Barbary, or any other savage country that may suit his turn of mind better than Old England; but if he resides here much longer, she advises him en amie not to damn and curse all the English as he now does, and that he will take care for the future, wherever he lodges, to burn only his own coals.

Though the whole truth of the story will probably never be known, it seems