“Uncle Lawrence” has again furnished his young friends with a capital story[M] which has the rare merit of teaching them a great many things without boring them at all. The queer ideas and experiments of Miss Mollie, the little heroine, are very entertaining. The book is largely an adaptation from the French.
The most complete edition of Lord Tennyson’s works[N] yet issued is the collection by the Harpers. It has the merit of being complete and exact; beside, the book is enriched by good illustrations, and has as an introduction a very excellent sketch of Tennyson, reprinted from Harper’s Magazine for December 1883.
The beautiful “Artists’ Edition” of “Gray’s Elegy,” which Messrs. Lippincott & Co. gave us last holiday time is out this year in a smaller but equally choice form.[O] The engravings in these books are exceedingly fine.
A really funny book is a rarity, but it is a rarity found in “Stuff and Nonsense.”[P] Mr. Frost has surpassed himself in the grotesque pictures he has put to his nonsensical rhymes. Particularly laughable are his picture stories, “A Fatal Mistake,” and “The Balloonists.”
Among the picture-and-song books for young folks, “Stories in Rhyme for Holiday Time”[Q] is particularly desirable. The rhymes are quite good, and the pictures better than in the average book of this kind. Among the rhymes, “Bob’s Bicycle Ride” will be found most entertaining, and “Eglantine, or The Magical Gloves” is a beautiful fairy story.
Shakspere’s Seven Ages of Man furnishes the text for an elegant holiday volume[R] of full page photogravures. These illustrations are from well known paintings, notable among them being Church’s “Infant” and Harper’s “School Boy.” It is a very choice book.
Mr. Shepard in simplifying Josephus has met a want of the times. These old masterpieces of literature which it used to be thought only mature minds could comprehend, rewritten into simpler language for young readers can not fail of bringing about grand results. The “Young Folks’ Josephus”[S] is written in language that any scholar in the fourth reader class can readily understand and enjoy.
The story of two fun-loving, manly boys who lived in Compton,[T] is full of rich humor, and many a hearty laugh is enjoyed over its pages. The scrapes they got into, and some of their original methods of trying to get out again are set forth in such a vivid manner that one feels almost as if he had been through them himself. And the fact that one of these boys was white and the other black only heightens the interest of the book.
“Country Cousins,”[U] although it does not belong to the older people, seems to be especially interesting to them. The New York Tribune says, in answer to one of its correspondents; “Mrs. ⸺ will find ‘Country Cousins’ pleasant reading in natural history.” It might have said, too: If any boy or girl wants to know about birds, or toads, or elks, or tree-chopping, or all kinds of shells, and ever so many other things, they can all be found illustrated and fully described in “Country Cousins.”
The last of the entertaining Bodley books[V] opens by presenting to the reader a group of six persons sitting on the deck of a steamer which was just casting off from Hull for a voyage to Scandinavia. They go as far north as any one can go, and see the sun at midnight; they visit the fiords, and the principal mountains, and all leading places of interest; they seek out the home of Hans Christian Andersen and Thorwaldsen; and after spending several months in this way return to their home in the United States.