Sportsman (who has mounted boy for his first hunt in Ireland). "Well, how did you get on?"
Boy. "First-rate, thank you. I'll go in a hard hat next time, though. A fellow came up to me at the meet and said, 'Cap, half-a-crown, please.'"
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
A new novel by Anthony Hope certainly deserves in these days to be considered a literary event of some importance. His Lucinda (Hutchinson) seems to me both in plot and treatment equal to the best of his work; as dignified and yet as lightly handled as anything he has given us in the past. The plot (which I must not betray) is excellent. From the moment when Julius, the narrator, making his leisurely way to the wedding of Lucinda, is passed by her alone in a taxicab going in an opposite direction, the interest of the intrigue never slackens. Into an epoch of rather "over-ripe" and messy fiction this essentially clean and well-ordered tale comes with an effect very refreshing and tonic. Anthony Hope's characters as ever are vigorously alive; in Lucinda herself he has drawn a heroine as charming as any in that long gallery that now stretches between her and the immortal Dolly. In short, those novel-readers who are (shall I say?) beginning to demand the respect due to middle age will enjoy in these pages the threefold reward of present interest, retrospection and a comforting sense that the literary judgment of their generation is here triumphantly vindicated in the eyes of unbelieving youth. What could be more pleasant?
It is a delight to welcome the Life of Mrs. R. L. Stevenson (Chatto and Windus), not only for the exceptional attraction of the environment in which she lived for many years, but because under any circumstances she would have been a remarkable woman. Once, when asked to write her own life, she refused because it seemed to her like "a dazed rush on a railroad express;" she despaired of recovering "the incidental memories." So it fell to her sister, Mrs. Van De Grift Sanchez, to undertake the task. A difficult one, for there was always the fear that the personality of Mrs. Stevenson might seem to be overshadowed by that of her husband. But the author, in giving us many interesting details about Robert Louis Stevenson, has been careful to select for the most part only those in which his wife was closely concerned. "In my sister's character," she writes, "there were many strange contradictions, and I think sometimes this was a part of her attraction, for even after knowing her for years one could always count on some surprise, some unexpected contrast which went far in making up her fascinating personality." Contradictions undoubtedly were to be found in her; thus during her later years Mrs. Stevenson intensely desired quietness and peace, and yet her love for change of scene never seemed to abate; but she was constant in her devotion as a wife and in her staunchness as a friend. Some excellent illustrations are included in this volume, and the only fault I have to find with it is that it lacks an index.
In selecting his hero for No Defence (Hodder and Stoughton) from the mutineers at the Nore, it may be admitted that Sir Gilbert Parker displayed a certain originality. With regard, to the clou of his plot, however, I can hardly say so much. Melodramatic young lovers have (in fiction) gone to prison and worse rather than employ a defence involving distress to the ladies of their choice, from ages untold. Dyck Calhoon did it when he was wrongly indicted for the killing of Erris Boyne, who was a traitor in the pay of France and incidentally the father of the heroine Sheila; though she knew nothing of this and would have been badly worried if the hazards of a defended murder case had brought it to light. Do you call the motive sufficient? No more do I. However, Dyck goes to prison, emerging just in time to join the fleet and became a successful rebel under the Naval soviets established by Richard Parker. Subsequently he takes his ship into action on the legitimate side, earns the quasi-pardon of exile on parole in Jamaica, finds a fortune of Spanish treasure, quells a black rising, is cleared of the murder charge (by the wholly preposterous arrival in the island of the now aged lady who had really done the deed—exactly like the finale of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera) and marries the heroine. A breathless plot, by which, however, my own pulse remained unquickened. To be brutally frank, indeed, the telling seemed to me wholly lacking in precisely the qualities of dash and crescendo required to carry off such a tale. Costume romance that halts and looks backward soon loses my following.