The Centenary of JANE AUSTEN is to be celebrated in a thoroughly practical manner by the House of Hussell.  It will be remembered that, some thirty years ago, an effort was made to revive the waning popularity of SIR WALTER SCOTT by the issue of a series of condensed versions of his novels, in which redundant passages, notes and introductions were removed and the salient features were compressed in a compact and animated narrative.  In order to render justice to JANE AUSTEN the process needed is diametrically opposite.  JANE AUSTEN’S novels are short and singularly lacking in picturesqueness, emotion, colour.  Mr. Hamo Bletherley, who has been entrusted with the task of infusing these elements into JANE AUSTEN’S staid and reticent romances, points out that her vocabulary was extraordinarily limited.  Her abstinence from decorative epithets led to results that are bald and unconvincing.  One may look in vain in her pages for such words as “arresting,” “vital,” “momentous” or “sinister.”  She never uses “glimpse,” “sense” or “voice” as verbs.  We look forward with eager anticipation to the results of Mr. Bletherley’s courageous experiment.

* * * * *

In this connection we cannot too heartily congratulate Mr. Jerome Longmore, the well-known bookman and literary curio-collector, on his latest stroke of good luck.  It appears that in a recent pilgrimage to Selborne he met the only surviving great-granddaughter of Sarah Timmins (charwoman at Chawton in the years 1810 to 1815), and purchased from her a pair of bedroom slippers, a pink flannel dressing-gown and a boa which had belonged to the great novelist.  A full description of these priceless relics will shortly appear in The Penman, together with a life and portrait of Sarah Timmins, who married a pork butcher in Liphook and died in 1848.  One of her letters establishes the interesting fact that JANE AUSTEN never ate sausages.

* * * * *

We may add that Mr. Longmore is not one of those miserly collectors who brood over their treasures and deny the sight of them to others.  On the contrary he takes the keenest pleasure in showing them to his friends, and at the present time is holding a series of informal receptions at his charming villa at Potter’s Bar, at which, robed in JANE AUSTEN’S dressing-gown, wearing her boa and shod in her slippers, he presents a truly romantic and distinguished spectacle.  We understand that the Potter’s Bar authorities are favourably considering the proposal that warnings of air raids in that locality should be given by the appearance in public of Mr. Longmore in this striking dress.

* * * * *

    “...  Mr. Lloyd George, on whom, by devious paths, has
    descended the mantle of Lord Rosebery.”—­Daily Express.

Including the PRIMROSE path, we presume.

* * * * *