There is something very soothing in the peeps into dusty family papers and the faint echoes of departed gossip which Mrs. Stirling provides in A Painter of Dreams (Lane). These pleasantly amateurish historical studies go back a century and a half. A commonplace book from which are quoted many diverting and incredible things; a chapter in which those queer Radicals, Horne Tooke, Cobbett, Sir Francis Burdett and bluff Squire Bosville, are chiefly concerned; a sketch of the fourth Earl of Albemarle, keen farmer and friend of Coke of Norfolk, Master of the Horse to William IV. and Queen Victoria (it is to Albemarle in this capacity that the Iron Duke said: "The Queen can make you go inside the coach, or outside the coach, or run behind it like a d——d tinker's dog"), winner of the Ascot Gold Cup three years running and stiff-backed autocrat; an account of the beautiful Misses Caton of Baltimore and their matrimonial adventures—the American invasion of brides bringing money and beauty in exchange for titles thus dating back to 1816; some details of the lives of two artists, John Herring, animal painter, and Roddam Spencer Stanhope, one of the lesser pre-Raphaelites and the painter of dreams referred to in the title—these all make up an agreeable pot-pourri with an old-world fragrance which ought to be able to charm you out of the preposterous nightmare of the present. But it makes one feel old to see that the conscientious author thinks that Dicky Doyle now needs a footnote to let the present generation know who he was.
From the Catalogue of a V.T.C. Tailor.
"'I am,' a V.T.C. Secretary writes, 'in correspondence with the undertaker, and hope at last to induce the War Office to recognise us by sending a representative to attend our funeral rites.'"
"One man of four who escaped the bombs."—Morning Paper.
A little too old for the baby-killers.
"Lord Sumner on the Need for Self-Sacrifice.
'If the House of Lords and the House of Commons could be taken and thrown into a volcano every day the loss represented would be less than the daily cost of the campaign.'"—The Times.
It sounds a drastic remedy, but might be worth trying.