By Mrs. Craik.
"The author of 'John Halifax' has written many fascinating stories, but we can call to mind nothing from her pen that has a more enduring charm than the graceful sketches in this work. Such a character as Jessie stands out from a crowd of heroines as the type of all that is truly noble, pure, and womanly."—United Service Magazine.
DALEFOLK.
By Alice Rea.
"'Dalefolk' tells of the effect produced on a simple and impressible people by a terrific curse, pronounced by a half-insane clergyman on a parishioner whom he believes to have written an anonymous letter of complaint to the Bishop of the diocese The cloud of mingled awe and repulsion that rests on the family for two generations is forcibly described. But this is only a background for a series of capital sketches of life as it was among the West Cumberland dalesmen at a period—this is the only note of time—when the diocese was ruled from Chester instead of, as now, from Carlisle. The author evidently writes from full acquaintance with her subject, and brings out in vivid colours the quaint, old festivities, the dancings, and wrestlings, and card-playings, the great gatherings for shearings and 'salvings,' all of them excuses for genial and unstinted hospitalities, and renewals of kind, neighbourly feeling and good-fellowship, which were so needed among the loneliness and isolation which were of necessity the habitual lot of the occupiers of the great sheep farms. She is equally happy in entering into the ways of thought and feeling which must have been characteristic of the primitive and simple folk to whom the reader is introduced in her pleasant pages."—Guardian.
STUDIES FROM LIFE.
By Mrs. Craik.
"These studies are truthful and vivid pictures of life, often earnest, always full of right feeling, and occasionally lightened by touches of quiet genial humour. The volume is remarkable for thought, sound sense, shrewd observation, and kind and sympathetic feeling for all things good and beautiful."—Morning Post.