Irving, Washington.
The Alhambra.
Illustrated by Joseph Pennell.
Macmillan. 1.50
It will be strange indeed if these fascinating and romantic tales fail to stir the imagination of any young person who reads them and to arouse in him the laudable ambition of some day seeing for himself the three palaces, the mosque, the chapel, and the halls, of the marvellous Alhambra.
The work was the amusement of his leisure moments, filling the interval between the completion of one serious, and now all but unknown, history and the beginning of the next.... And thus his name has become so closely associated with the place that, just as Diedrich Knickerbocker will be remembered while New York stands, so Washington Irving cannot be forgotten so long as the Red Palace looks down upon the Vega and the tradition of the Moor lingers in Granada.
E. R. Pennell.
Irving, Washington.
Bracebridge Hall.
Illustrated by Randolph Caldecott.
Macmillan. 1.50
"The reader, if he has perused the volume of the Sketch Book, will probably recollect something of the Bracebridge family, with which I once passed a Christmas. I am now on another visit at the Hall, having been invited to a wedding which is shortly to take place.... The family mansion is an old manor-house, standing in a retired and beautiful part of Yorkshire. Its inhabitants have been always regarded through the surrounding country as 'the great ones of the earth,' and the little village near the hall looks up to the squire with almost feudal homage.... While sojourning in this stronghold of old fashions, it is my intention to make occasional sketches of the scenes and characters before me."
The success of Old Christmas has suggested the republication of its sequel Bracebridge Hall, illustrated by the same able pencil, but condensed so as to bring it within reasonable size and price.--Preface.