Iron County Register

LITERARY PERSONALS.

Italy's greatest living poet, Giosue Carducci, celebrated his seventieth birthday on July 27. Until a few months ago he had retained his chair as professor of classical literature at the University of Bologna, which he first occupied in 1860.

Charles Frohman once produced a play by Henry Arthur Jones which failed so utterly that it was withdrawn after one performance. The author cabled next morning: "How is it going?" The manager answered: "It has gone.-Frohman."

The woman who purchased Mommsen's library and presented it to Bonn university is the wife of Dr. von Rottenburg, rector of the university. She is an American, the daughter of E. J. Phelps, who was United States minister to England during Mr. Cleveland's first term.

Count Tolstoi's sense of humor still continues to exist. One day he was discussing Ibsen with a friend. Said the latter: "I have seen a great many of Ibsen's plays, but I cannot say that I understand them. Do you?" Tolstoi smiled and replied: "Ibsen doesn't understand them himself. He just writes them and sits down and waits. After a while his expounders and explainers come and tell him precisely what he meant."

Horatio F. Brown, a prominent English writer on Venetian subjects, has had a singular experience with fires. The original draft of his first and best known work, "Life on the Lagoons" perished in a blaze; the manuscript of his "Study in the Venetian Inquisition" was burned in a mail car two years later. A similar fate overtook both that of his "Calendar of Venetian State Papers" and his "Studies in Archaeology."