"The Cloister and the Hearth," in spite of its faults, is really a great book. It is a positive contribution to history as well as to romance. It would be vain to point to any other volume which could convey to common minds so clear and accurate a conception of European life in the fifteenth century as this. The author has deeply studied the annals, memoirs, and histories which record the peculiarities of that life, and he has carried into the study a knowledge of those powers and passions of human nature which are the same in every age. The result is a "romance of history" which contains more essential truth than the most labored histories; for the writer is a man who has both the heart to feel and the imagination to conceive the realities of the time about which he writes.
The characterization of the book is original, various, and powerful. It ranges from the lowest hind to the most exquisite representative of female tenderness and purity. The scenes of passion show a clear conception of and a strong hold upon the emotional elements of character, and a capacity to exhibit their most terrible workings in language which seems identical with the feelings it so burningly expresses. In vigor and vividness of description and narration the novel excels any of Reade's previous books. The plot is about the same as that of "The Good Fight," though the dénouement is different. "The Cloister and the Hearth," indeed, incorporates "The Good Fight" in its pages, but the latter forms not more than a fourth of the extended work. Altogether the romance must be classed among the best which have appeared during the last twenty years.
Lessons in Life. A Series of Familiar Essays. By TIMOTHY TITCOMB. New York: Charles Scribner, 16 mo.
Who is more popular than honest Timothy? Opening this, his latest volume, we read on, a fly-leaf fronting the title-page that twenty-six editions of the "Letters to Young People," fifteen editions each of "Bitter-Sweet" and "Gold Foil," and thirteen editions of "Miss Gilbert's Career" have gone the way of all good books. The author says, in his modest preface to the "Lessons," that he can hardly pretend to have done more than to organize and put into form the average thinking of those who read his books, and be only claims for his essays that they possess the quality of common sense. He herein pays a very high compliment to the crowd which demands over the bookseller's counter so many thousands of his volumes. Wisdom, admirably put, is not a commodity glutting the market every day. We find in the pages of this new venture so many healthy maxims and so much excellent advice, that we hope the volume will spread itself farther and wider than any of its predecessors. This wish fulfilled will give it no mean circulation. "The Ways of Charity," one of the papers in this volume, ought to be printed in tract form, and scattered broadcast everywhere. And there are other articles in the book quite as good as this.
English Sacred Poetry of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. Selected and edited by ROBERT ARIS WILLMOTT, M.A. Illustrated by Holman Hunt, John Gilbert, and others. London: Routledge & Co. 4to.
Mr. Willmott has considerable reputation for judgment and taste as a compiler. He knows a good poem afar off, and his chief pleasure seems to lie in reproducing from old books the excellent things that time has spared to us. His last contribution to the stock of elegant volumes is this very handsome book of English Sacred Poetry. The illustrations are by no means equally good, but the majority of them are satisfactory. Delicious bits of English landscape scenery peep out along the pages, as one turns the leaves of this beautiful collection. An old village church rising among the graves of centuries, a bird's-nest snug and warm in the boughs of a mossy tree, a group of old-time worshippers gathered on the grass, a brook making its way through flower-enamelled banks, a shepherd with his flock couched on the hill-side, and other similar scenes of quiet and rest, abound in this volume. The printer and the binder have produced as luxurious a specimen of their respective arts as we have seen from the British holiday press.
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The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Based upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and Investigations by the Same Author. By Frederic Law Olmsted. In Two Volumes. New York. Mason Brothers. 12mo. pp. viii., 376; 404. $2.00.