Literary Notices.

It is becoming more and more the fashion for play wrights to publish their works in book form, and thus to protest against being regarded as outside the domain of pure literature. Mr. Pinero and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones have already vindicated their claims, and the latest comer to their ranks is Mr. ComynsCarr in his play, King Arthur, just published by Macmillan and Co. An additional interest centres about this play from the fact that it is one of Henry Irving's favorites and it being produced with the utmost success in his present American tour.

Mr. George Saintsbury, formerly of Merton College, Oxford, who has just been nominated by the Crown to the chair of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh, made vacant by the resignation of Prof. David Masson, has completed his volume on Nineteenth Century Literature, which contains some of his most brilliant work. The difficulties, not alone of generalization and classification, but also of selection and proportionment, are infinitely greater in the case of writers of our own century than in that of earlier writers; yet Mr. Saintsbury has emerged very successfully from his difficult task, and has produced a work well fitted to up-hold its author's rank among the greatest of living critics.

Quite a noticeable literary event is the warm welcome given by the public to the new one-volume Cambridge Edition of Robert Browning. In spite of his later popularity and the widespread study of his works by clubs and classes, Browning would, beyond these readers, naturally be regarded as rather "caviare" to the many. It is therefore remarkable that the whole of a large first edition of this book should be swept off immediately upon publication, and the publishers compelled to go to press at once with a second edition to supply the demand.

The new volumes in the edition of the novels of Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett, and published by Macmillan and Co., contain A Sportsman's Sketches. Turgenev began his literary career and won an enormous popularity in Russia by his sketches from peasant life. These volumes contain some of the best of his short stories, and gain a special interest from the influence they had upon the action of the late Czar in his more kindly treatment of the serfs.