with Esau) makes a very amusing study. A good deal of care is expended upon the wrong-doer himself, but somehow he does not materialize very vividly to the reader's consciousness. The hero, the child of genius who is unable to cope with practical life, his honest, irascible, unstable father, who is by turns violent and unreasonable, humble and generous, the good-humored Miss Joy, the wise Ritualistic clergyman,—in fact, all the other characters,—are well-worn types in fiction.
John Habberton's "Country Luck" (J. B. Lippincott Company) is a pleasantly-told story of how a young fellow comes up from his native village of Haynton to New York City, surprises and rather embarrasses the family of a New York merchant who had been boarding at his father's house during the preceding summer by taking in good faith the invitations they had extended to him at parting (of course he had previously fallen in love with the merchant's daughter), overcomes by sheer pluck, good sense, good manners, and good morals the obstacles which ill-fitting clothes and some solecisms of behavior had at first raised up in his path, ingratiates himself with the merchant's family and their circle of acquaintances, or at least with all save the rival lover and the scheming and very conventional mamma, becomes the merchant's confidential clerk, and at last wins even mamma's consent by first saving the fortunes of the family and finally becoming the secretary of the Haynton Bay Improvement Company, which insures him a brilliant future.
The Honorable Samuel S. Cox has earned some reputation as a humorist in the halls of Congress. He has not justified this reputation in "The Isles of the Princes, or the Pleasures of Prinkipo" (Putnams). Either the spoken jest is a different thing from the written one, or else our Congressmen, with all their wide culture, their exquisite taste, have a very, very rudimentary sense of humor. The book is simply irritating. Even if the humor were genuine, one could not help feeling victimized by an author who seems to expect us to exclaim, "How good I" at the end of every sentence. But it is strained, forced, and unnatural,—a ghastly reflex of Mark Twain. Where Mr. Cox drops humor to parade his learning, he becomes remarkable only for garrulous ignorance and glib inaccuracy. The pictures interspersed through the text are no worse than the text itself.
Another example of the difference between the spoken and the written jest is afforded by Eleanor Kirk's little compilation, "Beecher as a Humorist: Selections from the Published Works of Henry Ward Beecher" (Fords, Howard, and Hulbert). Here is nothing offensive, however; the humor seems a little thin, that is all; but you often come across a bit of sturdy, honest good sense put into homely and vigorous English.
What a blessed thing it is that our writers are beginning to lose what used to be called the finer literary conscience,—that they are willing to degrade their pens to Grub-Street hack-work! Here is Edward Everett Hale, who has written excellent things that will live in our literature, putting his name as editor to a compilation entitled "Lights of Two Centuries," being biographies of the masterminds of the last two centuries in the world's progress, and comprising artists and sculptors, prose writers, composers, poets, inventors. Consequently the book is a good one, the selection of the subjects for biographies is made with intelligence, the English can be read with pleasure.
