Literature.

Ams. commonplace book of the early part of last century, sold last year for £9, has suddenly attracted much attention. It has been found to contain fragments from an otherwise unknown play Irus, attributed to Shakspeare. The Shakspearean critics (in whose judgment the ignorant public would do well not to put too much confidence), are of opinion that the play is genuine.

Who is the « cartoonist » of the Pall, Mall Budget? It would be difficult to find in the whole range of illustrated journalism anything worse conceived or more miserably drawn than the weekly atrocity which appears in its first page. Wit or humor might in some measure atone for bad execution, but these qualities are invariably absent, and the only break in the dead level of dreary dulness in these sketches is to be found in their occasional brutality.

The Publishers' Circular has a well grounded complaint on the subject of the dilatoriness of the daily press in the matter of reviews. « Since the rising of Parliament, » it says, « we have seen one or two reviews of books which were actually published a year or eighteen months ago. »

The Centennial Magazine is the name of a new literary monthly published at Sydney. It is said to be a creditable production.

The most popular of London comic papers is said to be Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday. We do not think it is known in the colonies; but a reprint of fifty of its cartoons may be seen in the booksellers' windows. It is a strange illustration of the cockney idea of humor. « Ally Sloper, » we believe, originated with C. H. Ross, an artist whose specialty is hideous bald-headed old men and toothless old women. Ross's Sloper was a disreputable ugly old man, with a battered hat and bulgy umbrella, who, with Iky Mo, a Jew accomplice, was represented as carrying out innumerable petty swindles. The character—dreary and monotonous enough—must have taken the popular fancy, or it would never have given its name to a periodical. The cartoons are by « the late W. G. Baxter, » whose work we have never seen elsewhere, but whose talents were certainly worthy of a better subject. The drawings are really good and spirited, and in most cases, with the exception of the horrible central figure, not unpleasing, though entirely lacking in wit or humor. Sloper, in Baxter's hands is a family man, and differs in many other ways from Ross's original, though the face and figure are retained. The fact that Ally Sloper has become a popular London figure, and that a periodical devoted to his doings is a success, reveals a deplorably low standard of popular taste, both in art and literature.

A literary discovery of great importance has been made in Japan, where a Chinese official has found a copy of Hwang Kan's Confucian Analects, over 1200 years old, with all the ancient commentator's notes. This work has disappeared in China for 700 or 800 years, and, as the whole history of the present copy is known, the Chinese Government has directed its Minister in Japan to borrow it, in order that a carefully corrected copy may be taken.