To say "mither" instead of "mother" seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialism.
There is a long essay on Lefébvre's Embroidery and Lace which is very characteristic, and has, we think, been quoted before. There is a short essay on Dinners and Dishes, from which the following passage may be extracted:
There is a great field for the philosophic epicure in the United States. Boston beans may be dismissed at once as delusions, but soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks, blue fish, and the pompons of New Orleans are all wonderful delicacies, particularly when one gets them at Delmonico's. Indeed, the two most remarkable bits of scenery in the States are undoubtedly Delmonico's and the Yosemite Valley, and the former place has done more to promote a good feeling between England and America than anything else has in this century.
These are worth having, if Wilde is worth having at all, because they are characteristic. There would have been no great occasion for weeping if they had been lost or if they had never been clipped from the papers in which they appeared. But since someone has had the industry to collect them, and since there is a sufficient demand to warrant their issue in volume form, we may receive them with a moderate pleasure.
The greater part of the volume, however, does not rise to this level. Even the most brilliant and versatile of writers cannot consistently display his individual powers in journeyman work; and Wilde, though his wit was irrepressible, almost involuntary, was no more conscientious than any other reviewer. When the good sentences came they came: when they did not, he made no particular effort to maintain either his style or his ideas on any very elevated plane. There is no great value for the reader of to-day in a picture of Mrs. Somerville in a review of a book on her by a Miss Phyllis Browne. And no reader is likely to take a very vivid delight in Wilde's comment on a book called How to be Happy though Married, that
Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a perfect museum of salt-cellars. We strongly recommend this book as one of the best of wedding presents
or in the jokes that Wilde quotes from the book. Unfortunately it is by no means clear that the anonymous compiler has realised how much uninteresting matter he is reprinting. He closes the volume with twenty-odd pages of Sententiæ, selected from reviews in which the gems of thought and language were detachably scattered. But these gems include such remarks as "No one survives being over-estimated," and "No age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor." We cannot therefore excuse him on the ground that he knew he was dragging lumber into the light, and did so from a pious if mistaken motive.