AMONG the brilliant young Englishwomen, who are making a name in contemporary literature, is Miss Violet Paget, the Vernon Lee whose “Miss Brown” has caused some scandal among the London pre-Raphaelites. She lives on the _terreno_ of No. 5 Via Garibaldi, Florence, and is not quite twenty-four years of age. She is a brilliant talker, and if sometimes sophistical, is never without a clever reason for her sometimes extreme and startling opinions. Her reading is astounding in its extent and variety; her memory more remarkable still. Some of the most striking essays, which have appeared in the English magazines and reviews during the last five years, on Italian art, history, and literature have been from her pen. Her time is greatly taken up with the care of her half-brother, Eugene Hamilton, the poet. The fate of this brilliant young man is a very sad one. He was in the Government service during the Siege of Paris and at the Geneva Alabama Claims Conference and was so overworked that he brought on a disease of the spine which has buried him in what Heine calls a “mattress grave.” Miss Paget’s mornings are devoted to riding with her brother, and whatever time she has for individual work is in the night or between the return from this drive and four in the afternoon, when her brother’s callers begin to arrive. Miss Paget is a great admirer of Henry James, is an omnivorous reader, an illogical but often wonderfully intuitive exponent of mediævalism, and a deadly enemy of the æsthetic movement. * * * * * THE Royal Spanish Academy has published in the _Madrid Gazette_ the conditions of a literary competition of considerable interest, to those at least conversant with Spanish literature. The temptation, in the shape of profit as well as of honor, should develop latent talent if it exists. The Academy proposes to give the successful author a gold medal, about 120_l._ in money, and 500 copies of the book. The first competition is for the best biographical and critical study upon Tirso de Molina; the second for a _romancero_ upon the lines of the “Romancero del Cid,” the subject being Don Jaime el Conquistador, the volume to contain not fewer than twenty nor more than fifty romances. The manuscripts of the _romancero_ must be furnished not later than March, 1886, and the Tirso, March, 1887. * * * * *