OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
My Baronite, constitutionally credulous, on reading the earlier works of John Oliver Hobbes, accepted the masculinity of the author as put forward on the title page. On reading The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham (Henry & Co.), he begins to doubt. No man, not the weakest-minded amongst us, habitually uses italics in writing a book. Moreover, none but a woman could draw such a creature as Mrs. Anne Warre. The more generous masculine nature could not imagine anything so unrelievedly undesirable. Doubtless she is made so bad the more strikingly to compare with Allegra, "whose charm was the charm of springtime and love, all the kind promises of the sunshine, the life, the tenderness, the warmth, the graciousness of nature." The book, the most ambitious, and, in point of length, the most important, that has come from the pen of John Oliver Hobbes, is marked by her gift of keen observation, that sees everything and sees through most people. Dialogue and narrative sparkle with felicitous turns, bubble over with epigram. There are boundless possibilities in John Oliver Hobbes; but she should turn her face more persistently to the sunlight. Dr. Warre and Allegra are so good and so pleasant, that the average reader would like a little more of them, and a little less of the almost impossible Mrs. Warre.
The proper study of mankind is man, and there could not be an apter tutor than Mr. Smalley. His Studies of Men (Macmillan), have, as he tells us in a preface, appeared for the most part in the New York Tribune. Everyone conversant with newspaper work will know that for many years Mr. Smalley's Letter from London to what, take it all in all, is the principal, certainly the weightiest, journal in the United States, has been its most prominent feature. A selection of these contributions have, happily, been rescued from the files of the newspaper, and are here presented. The Studies cover a wide range, but the subjects are all, in diverse fashion, interesting. One is struck with the extreme fairness of judgment displayed in dealing with men who stand so far apart as, for example, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Parnell, Mr. Spurgeon, Tennyson, Lord Rosebery, Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Froude, Mr. John Walter, and Lord Randolph Churchill. During his long residence in England Mr. Smalley has known these and others, personally and in their public aspect. He has stored a picture gallery in which posterity may see them as they lived, nothing extenuated nor anything set down in malice. By way of redressing afresh the balance between the Old World and the New, Mr. Smalley has turned his back on London, and, having all these years written about Europeans, for the edification of Transatlantic readers, is about to tell Europe, in the columns of the Times, something of the undercurrent of public affairs in the United States. He will find in himself a most damaging rival.
The Baron de B.-W.
A Home-Cured Tongue.—At a meeting of the "Gaelic League" in Dublin the other day, "the proceedings were conducted exclusively in Irish." Dr. Douglas Hyde, the President, said that the movement was advancing in favour every day, and that, "if this regress continued, the future of the Irish language was assured." But how about the future of those who have to listen to it? He subsequently read a poem called "An Bhainrioghan Aluinn," and, after that had the hardihood to remark that "both young and old take a delight" in speaking the language. As Mr. Pickwick would have said to Dr. Peter Magnus Hyde,—"It is calculated to cause them the highest gratification."
Mem. by an Unlucky Amateur Dabbler in the City.—To go in for "Specs" is short-sighted policy.
