The deuce can tell you how this may be, 'Tis far as I take the tale; For it's lives upon lives ago, you see, That the Barbary men set sail; So I only know she was ivory white, As white as a sea-bird lone; And her eyes were wonderful blue and bright And hard as a sapphire stone.
"Give a last pull at the oar with clenched teeth and knit muscles."--_The Young Man._
_The Cork Examiner_ on Sir PERCY SCOTT'S letter:--
"'If a battleships is not safe either on the high seas or in rabour,' he asks, 'what is the use of a battlesh?'"
To be more accurate, this is how one puts it to one's neighbour after dinner, when--the ladies having removed themselves, and the necessity for mere social chit-chat being over--we men are at last able to devote ourselves to the affairs of empire.
_Spectator_ (_to exhausted competitor reduced to running on trial hill_). "WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IF THAT CAR RAN AWAY FROM YOU?"
(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
The title of a book should be a guide to its contents, a simple enough rule which some authors overlook in their anxiety to start being clever and eccentric on the very outside cover. The book-buying public will appreciate Miss M. BETHAM-EDWARDS' title, _From an Islington Window, Pages of Reminiscent Romance_ (SMITH, ELDER), and will gather from it that this is a book for those who prefer a long life and a quiet one to the short and thrilling. Incidentally I am relieved from divulging any of the plots in order to demonstrate the nature of the twelve short pieces embodied; enough to quote two typical sub-titles, "Mr. Lovejoy's Love-story" and "Miss Prime," and to put upon the whole the label of the author's own choice, "Early Victorian." Everybody knows where and what Islington is and the sort of minor tragedy and comedy that would be likely to occur in the lives of its inhabitants in the last reign but one. No one would look there for epoch-making crises, but many will find a longed-for relief from the speeding-up tendencies of modern romance. Lastly, but for a tendency at times to affectation, the style of the writer is as graceful and elegant as her themes are homely and serene, and that, I think, is all about it.
Mr. W. E. NORRIS is subtle; at least if my idea of the genesis of _Barbara and Company_ (CONSTABLE) is the right one. I believe, then, that Mr. NORRIS found himself possessed of plots sufficient for a number of agreeable short stories, but that, knowing short stories to be more or less a drug in the market, he very skilfully united them into one by the simple process of making all their characters friends of _Barbara_. Nothing could be more effective. For example, Mr. NORRIS thinks what fun it would be to describe a race ridden by two unwilling suitors, the prize to be the lady's heart, which neither in the least wishes to win. Promptly _Miss Ormesby_, the heroine, is asked down on a visit to _Barbara_, and the story is told, most amusingly and well, in a couple of chapters. Again, the pathetic and moving tale of _Miss Nellie Mercer_, the nameless companion, who blossomed into fierce renown as _Senorita Mercedes_, the dancer, and died of it. Why should not this same _Barbara_ have adopted the parentless girl in childhood? It is all simplicity itself. Perhaps you may object that the useful _Barbara_ shows some signs of being a little overworked, and that few women are likely to have had quite so adventurous a company of friends. In this case I shall have nothing to urge, except that, so far as I am personally concerned, Mr. NORRIS has such a way with him that if he chose to people _Barbara's_ drawing-room with the persons of the _Arabian Nights_ he could probably convince me that there was nothing very much out of the ordinary in that assembly. And, after all, pianists and writers and actors, all the kind of folk with whom _Barbara_ surrounded herself, are precisely those to whom short stories should, and do, happen. Next time, however, I hope Mr. NORRIS'S inspiration will be less fragmentary but equally happy.