The Age of Disfigurement.

ington & Co.)

many, the book may be unreservedly recommended. Edward's work as a legislator, his foreign policy, the constitutional struggle in which his later years were passed,-all these matters are reviewed with admirable lucidity, and, for the space at the writer's disposal, remarkable amplitude; and it would be ungracious to complain that for the lineaments of the warrior and the conqueror we must look elsewhere.

The voice of Mr. Richardson Evans has ceased, one may rejoice to By Richardson Say, to be as "the voice of one crying in the wilderness." It has swollen Evans. (Ren- into a full-throated chorus which will gain, I sincerely trust, in strength and volume until, after having duly flagitated the public ear, it ultimately finds its way to the public mind. Mr. Evans's little paper-covered volume of a hundred pages contains in its first section a reprint of the Review article in which he first endeavoured to rouse the national sense of decency against the outrages of the pill-maker and the soap-boiler; its second section deals with the present phase of the remedial movement, and appends various draft schemes for the exorcism of the Advertising Fiend. The book is addressed, of course, more or less to the converted: but, after all, the Church of Laodicea itself was a communion of converts, yet much needed awakening; and Mr. Evans, a skilled and practised wielder of the pen, has grasped the true method of appeal to them. He writes with point and spirit, with picturesqueness and humour: yet withal one feels that he has suffered keenly from the horrors which he is denouncing. "A fever in these pages burns Beneath the calm they feign. A wounded human spirit turns Here on its bed of pain." Let us hope that the class of readers whom Mr. Evans addresses in this little volume may respond to his appeal by joining (as we must describe it, till we can invent a shorter title) the N.S.C.A.P.A., or National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, and by working with them to bring legislation to bear on the nuisance. We can afford to let the towns wait awhile; it is the country-side which must first be saved, for it is there that the offence of the advertiser is the most heinous. On some railway lines you can hardly pass a field in which you do not see the "abomination of desolation" or the "disgusting thing of the waste land," as the Greek is now rendered, I believe, by the best Biblical scholars-" standing where it ought not."

After the Revolution, and

Sydney Smith did South Britain a very bad turn in making that Other Holiday unfortunate sally of his about jokes and Scotchmen. He has made too William Wal many of the Scottish people-not, I grant, the most sensible among lace. (Hodge.) them-discontented with their very sound and genuine native growth

Fancies.

By

of humour (which Sydney could not have failed to appreciate if he had had the smallest acquaintance with it), and stirred in them an unwholesome ambition of rivalry in the display of English "wut." Now, the consequence of this is that the vaulting passion too often o'erleaps itself and falls o' the other side into, of all terrible landingplaces, the New Humour. Let the reader consider first what the New Humour is, and next what a Scotchman is, and then let him brace the nerves of his imagination to the point of contemplating the two together, the latter practising the former, and he will get some idea of After the Revolution and its author, Mr. William Wallace. Mr. Wallace is not without humorous invention, or shrewdness of observation, or power of literary expression; and if he could only have omitted about half of these funniments as too slight and foolish to deserve preservation, and have schooled himself in the rest to write naturally for half-a-dozen sentences together, thus giving his jokes a chance of coming in of themselves instead of dragging them into his pages by the head and ears, he might have written a book which would have been reasonably pleasant instead of inexpressibly tedious to read. But he has chosen to work on an exactly opposite principle, and the result is-well, the result is After the Revolution, and Other Holiday Fancies.

A well-written book on an interesting subject is its own justification. Jonathan Swift. By Mr. Churton Collins is an admirable writer, and the character, career, and Churton Collins. (Chatto genius of Swift will never cease to interest those who care either for and Windus.) letters or for the study of human nature. Consequently, one may welcome Mr. Collins's addition to the mass-mountainous though it be growing-of the literature of the subject; and endeavour not to smile at the statement of his reasons for having contributed it. His "attitude," as the diplomatists say, is "perfectly correct"; but it was really unnecessary for him to assume it. I cannot for a moment admit that there was any need for Mr. Collins to write the book, or that after the thoroughness with which all the known facts of Swift's life have been handled and the acuteness with which his character has been analysed by more than one biographer in recent years, there is any real demand for a new advocate to come forward and seek to procure justice for him "where justice has been either withheld or too grudgingly allowed." Others before Mr. Collins have vindicated Swift's "political consistency" and his conscientious Churchmanship, "the purity of his motives as well as his wisdom as an Irish agitator,”

and (though not, perhaps, in so determined a spirit of apology as Mr. Collins) his conduct with regard to Stella and Vanessa. Nevertheless I am glad Mr. Collins's avowed reason for writing his book, inadequate as it seems to me, has satisfied him, because otherwise we should have lost a very enjoyable volume, which brings forth things new and old, the new interesting in themselves, and the old things very often treated in a novel or a suggestive way. Memorials of The late Mr. Serjeant Bellasis was one of that small but remarkable Mr. Serjeant Bellasis. By group of lawyers who played a more or less prominent part in that Edward Bel- Tractarian movement which is now becoming so very shadowy to the

lasis.

(Burns

and Oates.)

present generation. Cardinal Newman, in a dedicatory letter to another of their number, Edward Badeley, congratulated himself on the fact that Catholic principles had appealed to "the trained intellect of a grave profession that is specially employed in rubbing off the gloss with which imagination and sentiment invest everyday life, and in reducing statements of fact to their legitimate dimensions." The "Cardinal" was more at home in the world of ideas than in that of men, or these pious lawyers would have less impressed him; for he would have known that when a layman is "clerically-minded," his clerical-mindedness is often such as to make the most saintly of ecclesiastics beat his breast as with the shame and contrition of a rebuked worldling. Hope Scott, Badeley, and Bellasis, says the writer, "afford examples of clever men of business, always industrious, but never too occupied to attend to the affairs of their own souls and of the souls of others in any way connected with them." A "clever man of business, always industrious," is, perhaps, hardly an adequate description of Mr. Hope Scott, who made one of the largest fortunes ever amassed, by one of the largest practices ever attained, at the Parliamentary bar. The other two it no doubt fits well enough, and their readiness to attend to the affairs of their own and certain other people's souls is therefore less remarkable than that of their more pre-occupied friend. Perhaps, however, their attention was closer and more prolonged, and certainly that of Serjeant Bellasis was very close indeed. These memorials of him treat almost exclusively of the spiritual side of his career, and devote little more than a chapter to the details of his secular and professional life. One cannot but be struck on reading them with their curious illustration of the fact, which presents itself again and again in the lives and characters of more famous personages of the so-called Catholic Revival, that the Tractarian was only the Evangelical turned inside out. To read the

history of the spiritual wrestlings which this estimable man passed through before "going over," is to recognise the essential affinity in point of temperament and mental habit between the zealot for "private judgment" and the self-surrendering devotee of "authority." There is the same narrowness of intellectual sympathy, the same religious valetudinarianism, so to speak, the same selfish concentration on the work of "making the soul," in the one man as in the other.

ham. Edited

by William

(Macmillan.)

Four essays on Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Blake, Alexander The Literary Works of Smith, and Gerard Dow, and a collection of about thirty short poems, James Smet constitute, the editor tells us, "the chief literary productions of James Smetham—or at least such of them as are likely to appeal in any wide Davies. degree to the public." It is to be feared that a stricter application of this principle of selection would still further reduce their number. Mr. Smetham's essay on William Blake may, perhaps, have deserved reproduction; for Blake is a practically inexhaustible subject, and a writer who has studied him as affectionately as Mr. Smetham, and who has a pleasant enough way of imparting the results of his studies, could hardly help being interesting. But the same cannot be said for the essay on Sir Joshua Reynolds, which, though Mr. Davies has a strange value for it, throws no new light on a tolerably familiar figure; nor of that on Alexander Smith, which could only be worth reprinting as criticism, not as biography, and which as criticism is unilluminating, not to say

monplace; nor of the paper on Gerard Dow, which is a mere sketch of half-a-dozen pages in length, originally contributed to an art journal. Curiously enough, the poems, of which the editor speaks somewhat coldly, have considerably more distinction than the prose, showing as they do, even where the note touched is not strictly poetic, a pregnancy of thought and a gift of vigorous expression which we look for, if not exactly in vain, at any rate with much less success, in the essays.

In two earlier volumes Mr. Robinson has taken the poets through The Poets and two orders of the vertebrate kingdom, and cross-examined them, so to Phil RobinNature. By speak, from a zoological brief of remarkable fulness. The Poets' Birds son. (Chatto and Windus.) and The Poets' Beasts, as most lovers of humour and of natural history know, respectively contain the amusing record of these two inquisitions; and in the third volume, The Poets and Nature, Mr. Robinson bids them render successive account of their treatment of reptiles, fishes, and insects. The Poets and Nature is not quite such entertaining reading as its two predecessors (using that word in its popular, not its strict etymological sense, and disclaiming any insinuation

that The Poets' Birds and The Poets' Beasts are in a literary sense deceased); and no doubt for this reason, that there is less of Mr. Robinson himself and more of Mr. Robinson's authorities. Any such book must, of course, deal freely in quotation, but this surely is somewhat excessively overlaid with extracts; nor is their presence invariably justified by the requirements of the text. Still it is undoubtedly a book which, once taken up, neither the student of poetry nor the "speechless world" will find it easy to lay down.

Mr. Tommy Life is a dreary business to most of the heroes and heroines of this Dove. By Margaret De- volume of short stories. If there were nothing else in it than those land. (Longmans.) sorrows of unrequited love, those torments of the unhappy marriage, those tragedies of the daughter incomprise, of which this distressing batch of tales entirely, or almost entirely, consists, we should assuredly be nearer that euthanasia of the human race which is written of in the book of the Prophet Schopenhauer. On artistic grounds Mrs. Deland would, I think, have done well to relieve the too prevailing gloom of her book with a story in which somebody succeeds in something. Still there is a melancholy side of life, no doubt, and it is a proper subject for art. The artist, however, who would portray it must be especially careful not to overstep the modesty of nature; for mankind, while naturally tolerant of exaggeration designed for their amusement, have a just right to resent being made artificially miserable. In other words, you may with more indulgence overdo your jests than" pile up your agony"; and the objection to "At Whose Door," and to one or two other stories in this volume, is that their author sets herself with too obvious and deliberate art to arrange for an improbably unhappy outfall of affairs. The story that is clearest of this charge, and that is otherwise the best conceived and the most artistically expressed in the telling, is "A Fourth Class Appointment," though in this too, excellent as for the most part it is, you find yourself wondering whether the note of excess does not reveal itself in the characters of Mandy and her mother, and whether an American post-mistress, even in an out-of-the-way place, can really be so innocently ignorant of the world. Clever, and here and there even powerful, writer as Mrs. Deland is, one turns, I confess, with a certain sense of relief to A Cathedral her fellow-countrywoman's volume, A Cathedral Courtship, a love-story, Courtship. By Kate Douglas it is true, of the old-fashioned type, but told with a touch of the idyllic, Wiggin. (Gay and with an agreeable ripple of sunny humour running through it. Vastly to be preferred is it, in my humble judgment, to the earlier work by which the author won her reputation. Qui Bavium non odit

and Bird.)