"WHITTINGTON REDIVIVUS."
The New Progressive Dick W. "WHAT ARE THE BELLS SAYING, PUSSY? 'TURN AGAIN, WHITTINGTON, LORD MAYOR OF LONDON,'—OR IS IT 'TURN OUT'?"
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
Mrs. Bonner has done well to write a record of the life and work of her father, Charles Bradlaugh, which Fisher Unwin publishes in two volumes. If it had been one 'twould have been better. Mrs. Bonner has been assisted in her labours by Mr. J. M. Robertson, who deals with Mr. Bradlaugh's political doctrine and work, and describes in detail his parliamentary struggle. The consequence is that the record runs into two closely-printed volumes, a proportion that somewhat overweights the interest of the subject. Mrs. Bonner is, naturally, indignant at the treatment her father received in the early days of his parliamentary life and in other public relations. But Mr. Bradlaugh was a fighting man. He gave hard knocks and, to do him justice, did not unduly complain when knocks were dealt back to him. It is a pathetic story how the crowning triumph of his life came in the hour of his death. He never knew that the House of Commons had unanimously agreed to the motion which expunged from its journals the resolution excluding the junior member for Northampton from its membership. That confession, my Baronite says, was the completest justification of the action on Mr. Bradlaugh's part that enlivened the Parliament of 1880-5 and was the immediate cause of the birth of the Fourth Party.
Mr. John Davidson's Earl Lavender is "pernicious nonsense," and the Aubrey Beardsley frontispiece—if, considering its subject, it can, with absolute correctness, be described as a "frontispiece,"—might, a few years ago, have endangered its existence. But "I suppose," quoth the Baron, "I am becoming old-fashioned, and 'we have changed all that now.' But in view of this extraordinary illustration, is it a book that can be left out 'promiscuously-like' on the drawing-room table? I trow not," quoth the Baron. "And as to The Great God Pan ('Key-note' series), well—infernally or diabolically clever it may be, but should I be informed," quoth the Baron, "that we should never look upon its like again, I, for one should not grieve."
Another Keynoteworthy book, i.e., one quite worthy to belong to such of the Key-note series as the Baron has read, is The Dancing Faun. Had a novel appeared some years ago in the palmy, but not less leggy, days of the drama at the Gaiety, entitled The Dancing Vaughan, when the elegant Kate of that ilk was the light and leading danseuse, what a vogue such a volume would have had among the patrons of the above-mentioned Temple of Burlesque-Extravaganza. "Où sont les neiges d'antan?" and "Where is dat barty now?"
B. de B.-W.