OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
The Walery-Gallery Co.—for Walery has transformed himself into a Limited Liability—is bringing out a series of "Sporting Celebrities," with sporting notes, monographs, and dramatic notes too. The photographs are excellent. Two in each monthly number. The monographs are right enough, but the sporting and dramatic notes in a monthly, are either not sufficient or too much. Three portraits and three monographs, one sportswoman and two sportsmen in each number would be better, at least, so it seems to the learned Baron, who would sum up the requisites for making the Walery-Gallery Sporting Series a success in a Shakspearian quotation, adapted for this special occasion,—"More art and less matter."
The Baron is always much interested in the Revue de Famille, directed and largely contributed to by M. Jules Simon, who is also a pretty regular contributor to its pages. In December last, M. Simon wrote a thoughtful and interesting article on L'Education des Femmes, and M. Francisque Sarcey, a very amusing paper on Le Timide au Théâtre. The number for February (it is only a bi-monthly publication) has a paper on L'Influence (not the influenza) des Femmes en France, the only fault of which is its length; and Gyp gives a satirical sketch called Nos Docteurs, which hardly seems in keeping with the family character of the Revue. The March Number is now out, and can be procured at Hachette's. It is one of the best French serials.
A delightful book is Yorkshire Legends and Traditions, collected and recounted by the Rev. Thomas Parkinson. He who writes of fairies and of witches should of course possess some potent spell—(how many members of the School-Board, had they lived a couple of hundred years ago, would have been punished as witches for teaching "spelling," it is pleasant to imagine)—and Mr. Parkinson's great charm is his apparent belief in the wonders he relates. Even when he occasionally alludes to "popular superstition," you feel it is only a phrase introduced evidently out of consideration for the unphilosophic prejudices of his "so-called" Nineteenth-Century readers, who pride themselves on being Huxleys in the full blaze of scientific light, and yet would shrink from passing a night in a haunted room, or, if alone, would go a mile out of their way to avoid an uncanny spot. The greatest mistake made by narrators of the marvellous is attempting to account for the unaccountable. This book is, I believe, one of a series now being published by Elliot Stock, of Paternoster Row, a stock which Your Own Baron recommends as a safe investment, for the book alone is a good dividend, the interest being kept up all through; and it is satisfactory to hear that, as the other counties of England, and perhaps of Ireland and Scotland, are being dealt with in a similar manner, there is a good reserve-fund of information and amusement.
Mr. Runciman, in The Fortnightly, brings a serious indictment of plagiarism against Mr. Rider Haggard, which it strikes me he would be unable to sustain in a Court of Common Sense before Mr. President Punch, unless it were first laid down as a fixed principle, that a writer of fiction must never have recourse to any narrative of facts whereon to base his Romance.
The Baron de Book-Worms.
MAXIMS FOR THE BAR.
No. I.
