Nell Gwynne: or the Court of the Stuarts. An Historical Romance. By W. Harrison Ainsworth: Philada. Carey & Hart.
Ainsworth is well known as the most prominent of the English novelists of intrigue, rascality, and horror. In the present work he has a fine subject for his peculiar powers—the delineation of the court of Charles II.—a good-natured rascal, who bartered away the interests and honor of England for money and mistresses, and who was surrounded by companions worthy of himself. Nell Gwynne was one of the least vixenish of his mistresses, and she is the heroine of Mr. Ainsworth’s novel. The opening scene of the book is appropriately laid in “The Devil’s Alley;” and through this alley most of the characters go. Mr. Ainsworth himself has been journeying through it ever since he commenced his career as a romancer; and he has been the humble means of leading others in the same path.
Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert, and Sanderson. By Isaak Walton. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 2 Parts. 12mo.
It is singular that this should be the first American edition of so celebrated a work. Isaak Walton has always been a favorite with readers, and his “Lives” have held a prominent place among choice books. The most extravagant admiration has been expressed for them by men of the finest genius. Wordsworth says, in not the least beautiful of his sonnets, that
—“The feather whence the pen
Was shaped, that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropt from an angel’s wing.”
We never knew a case where the book was read without giving delight. Indeed it nestles close to the heart. There is a quaint, cunning, quiet beauty to it, which wins upon the mind, and gently forces assent to its excellence. Such a book is balm to a sensitive and irritable spirit. It is read with some such feeling as might be excited by a benediction from Chaucer’s good parson. Every one who desires to “possess himself in much quietness,” whose brain has been fretted and stung by the morbid creations of the Satanic school of letters, should devote his days and nights to Isaak Walton, as Johnson advised the style-monger to devote himself to Addison. The sweet serenity which breathes through the whole book, joined to the sly quaint beauty of the expression, cannot fail to charm every mind not wholly debauched by the “storm-and-pressure” style now in vogue. The men to whom the book relates, are among the saints of English literature; men who combined great learning and greater intellect, with sweetness of disposition and repose of manner. We can hardly conceive of a reader rising from the perusal of these “Lives” without having some of their many amenities infused into his heart.