Word: vii
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...spite of all this, in 1912 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (pronounced Cootch, "not like a sofa") was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. "I'm in a hideous funk about it," he wrote to a friend. But the funk didn't last long, and in time Q became one of the most popular lecturers the university had. When he died four years ago at 81, he was still lecturing. Last week, in a short, intimate biography (Arthur Quiller-Couch; Macmillan, $3.50), his friend Fred Brittain, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, tried to tell...
Hals Remembered. Painter Sargent was 45 when Edward VII became king, and it was already quite the thing to be "painted by Sargent." He was a portly, generous gentleman, more at home with his fellow expatriate Henry James than with the eccentric Bohemians of the art world. He resisted the Pre-Raphaelites and "Ruskin, don't you know . . . silly old thing." He ignored the principles of art for art's sake, detested Gauguin and Van Gogh. His advice to one of his own disciples: "Begin with Franz Hals, copy and study Franz Hals, after that go to Madrid...
...successively bigger jobs in Nice, San Remo, Lucerne, Rome, BadenBaden, Vienna. He remembered and carefully catered to the whims of such tourists as Cornelius Vanderbilt (who liked to chew cold cigars), John Wanamaker (who asked "are you leading a Christian life?"), the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (who liked his beef well-done). On one of the jobs, César Ritz formed a lifelong partnership with an obscure chef named Auguste Escoffier...
...first-and best-portrait in the book is of the author's Uncle Christopher, a "swell" of the Victorian era, whose heroic snobbery found its reward-and its doom-in the friendship of that nearly perpetual Prince of Wales who eventually became Edward VII. The story of Sir Christopher Sykes resembles a tale by Max Beerbohm, with this difference: the writer's grave pleasure in his subject never gets out of hand into fantasy...
Unprincely Life. At Sandringham, the Duke recalls, King Edward VII occupied the merrily run "Big House" while David lived with his family in a "Bachelors' Cottage." "When the whole family was assembled under the roof, together with a lady-in-waiting for Mama and an equerry for Papa, a governess for Mary and one or two tutors for my brothers and myself, 'The Cottage' was full to bursting, so much so that when a puzzled visitor asked where the servants slept, my father answered that he didn't know, but supposed it was in the trees...