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Bret Harte.
The humorous writings of this author are as widely read, and as keenly appreciated, in England as in the United States, and when the prose portion of this collection is reached his Sensation Novels Condensed will be fully considered. In these he has admirably hit off the peculiarities of style of such varied writers as Miss Braddon, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, Lord Lytton, Alexander Dumas, F. Cooper, Captain Marryat, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Wilkie Collins; whilst in Lothaw he produced a clever little parody of Lord Beaconsfield's Lothair.
Bret Harte has ably described both the comic and the pathetic sides of the wild life of the Californian miners, with which he is thoroughly familiar; and his best known poems deal with phases of life in that part of the world, where the Chinese element enters largely into the population. For convenience of comparison, the original "Heathen Chinee" is given below, followed by the parodies:—
PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES.
Table Mountain, 1870.
WHICH I wish to remark—
And my language is plain—
That for ways that are dark,
And for tricks that are vain,