THE LINKS BEING DEVOTED TO ALLOTMENTS, MR. AND MRS. BUNKER-BROWNE PRACTISE APPROACH SHOTS, WITH THE IDEA OF FILLING THEIR BASKET WITH POTATOES AT THE SAME TIME.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Marmaduke (HEINEMANN) has this peculiarity, that the title rôle is by no means its most important or interesting character. Indeed it might with more propriety have been called Marrion, since hers is not only the central figure in the plot, but emphatically the one over which Mrs. F. A. Steel has expended most care and affection. Moreover the untimely death of Marmaduke leaves Marrion to carry on the story for several chapters practically single-handed. I am bound to say, however, that at no stage did she get much help from her colleagues, all of whom—the gouty old father and his intriguing wife, the faithful servant, even debonair Marmaduke himself—bear a certain air of familiarity. But if frequent usage has something lessened their vitality, Marrion is a living and credible human being, whether as daughter of a supposed valet, adoring from afar the gay young ensign, or as the unacknowledged wife of Marmaduke and mother of his child, or later as an army nurse amid the horrors of Crimean mismanagement. Later still, when the long arm of coincidence (making a greater stretch than I should have expected under Mrs. Steel's direction) brought Marrion to the bedside of her parent in a hospital tent, and converted her into a Polish princess, I lost a little of my whole-hearted belief in her actuality. There are really two parts to the tale—the Scotch courtship, with its intrigues, frustrated elopements, et hoc genus omne; and the scenes, very graphically written, of active service at Varna and Inkerman. I will not pretend that the two parts are specially coherent; but at least Mrs. Steel has given us some exceedingly interesting pictures of a period that our novelists have, on the whole, unaccountably neglected.
The Experiments of Ganymede Bunn (HUTCHINSON) is like to command a wide audience. Its appeal will equally be to the lovers of Irish scenes, to those who affect stories about horses and hunting, and to the countless myriads who are fond of imagining what they would do with an unexpected legacy. It was this last that happened to Ganymede, who was left seventeen thousand pounds by an aunt called Juno (the names of this family are not the least demand that Miss Dorothea Conyers makes upon your credulity). My mention of horses and Ireland shows you what he does with his money, and where. It does not, however, indicate the result, which is a happy variant upon what is usual in such cases. You know already, I imagine, the special qualities to be looked for in a tale by Miss Conyers—chief among them a rather baffling inability to lie a straight course. If I may borrow a metaphor from her own favourite theme, she is for ever dashing off on some alluring cross-scent. More important, fortunately, than this is the enjoyment which she clearly has in writing her stories and passes briskly on to the reader. There's a fine tang of the open-air about them, and a smell of saddle-leather, that many persons will consider well worth all the intricacies of your problem-novelists. I had the idea that her honest vulgar little legatee and his speculations as a horse-breeder might make a good subject for a character-comedian; but I suppose the late LORD GEORGE SANGER is the only man who could have produced the right equine cast.
The component elements of The White Rook (CHAPMAN AND HALL) may be summarised in the picturesque argot of Army Ordnance somewhat as follows: Chinamen, inscrutable, complete with mysterious drugs, one; wives, misunderstood, Mark I, one; husbands, unsympathetic (for purposes of assassination only), one; ingénues, Mark II, one; heroes, one; squires, brutal, one; murders of sorts, three; ditto, attempted, several. The inscrutable one is responsible for all the murders. Only the merest accident, it seems, prevents him from disposing of the few fortunate characters who survive to the concluding chapters of the story. He narrowly misses the misunderstood wife (now a widow, thanks to his kind offices), and his failure to bag the hero and ingénue (together with a handful of subsidiary characters) is only a matter of minutes. There is almost a false note about the last chapter, in which the Oriental commits suicide before he has completed his grisly task; but it was obviously impossible for anyone in the book to live happily ever after so long as he remained alive. Just how Mr. HARRIS BURLAND and the villainous figment of his lively imagination perform these deeds of dastard-do is not for me to reveal. The publishers modestly claim that in the school of WILKIE COLLINS this author has few rivals. As regards complexity of plot the claim is scarcely substantiated by the volume before me; but if bloodshed be the food of fiction Mr. BURLAND may slay on, secure in his pre-eminence.