fully but firmly admonish one of its own brilliant band? But we will be bold, and take the consequences. Perhaps our masters of the press will this time pass us over with silent contempt; perhaps they will give us a practical example of the art of rollicking, in which they incorrectly assume us to be making essays. Nay: but taking lessons, if perhaps we may learn that difficult art; for to rollick wisely and well is a fine thing in its way. It is an art that has passed out of the ordinary moyens of the critic. Time was when a member of that craft would pick up a startled author upon the point of his spear, and flourish him forth in mid air to the admiration of all beholders. It was not kind, for the contortions of the poor wretch were sometimes painful to behold; but it was as clever, and probably as exciting, as that fine art of playing a salmon which men of fine feeling hope does not hurt the fish. The critic, we fear, is less benevolent, and does not hope that his victim is incapable of feeling. It is painful to think of the hook which will presently transfix our innocent jaw; of the wild fluster of darting hither and thither, to which in our rage and anguish we will presently be exposed. Conscious, however, of this so possible penalty, and preparing for the worst, we still gently but decidedly repeat that Mr Andrew Lang must get him a subject if he would ever do justice to the fine-pointed pencil which he possesses. We wish that the subject may not be our mangled body, which would be an affair of a moment--exactly the sort of thing from which we are endeavouring to wean him. Let it be something of his own. The world is wide-room there is in it for everybody who possesses the necessary weapons. So have we seen a timid bather stand tremulous upon the edge-let us say of that rock called the Step, upon a certain stormy opening of the Northern seas-making little runs as if to take the final spring, jostling the bolder bather, who rushes at a bound into the cold, blue, dancing waves. The sea is cold but that keen east wind which whistles about the undefended limbs is in reality colder. One spring, and the wholesome shock will make the blood dance. The metaphor is perhaps defective, but the proceeding most desirable; and we hope that the accomplished writer to whom we wish so well will follow our advice. We may remark in passing, though the book in question is not a new one (comparatively), that in one case with which we are acquainted, Mr Lang did make this spring. The Mark of Cain"1 was but to outward semblance a shilling dreadful, and, as such, never, so far as we are aware, reached that extraordinary audience whose tastes are never to be calculated or predicted, who carried Called Back to the heights of fame. But it is at the same time a great deal more. It is one of the finest bits of goodhumoured satire with which we are acquainted. It has been read we don't doubt by hundreds of innocent people, to whom it was a sensational story of somewhat recondite flavour, and no more; but in fact, had the English reading public been as sharp-witted as it once was, had it been a public of finer apprehensions, this little book would have been the apotheosis at once and explosion for ever and ever of sensational dreadfuls, as much as Defoe's Short Way with the Dissenters' was the 1 The Mark of Cain. By Andrew Lang. Arrowsmith, Bristol: 1886. massacre deathblow in literature of fanatical Anglicanism in the seventeenth century. Never was a of the Innocents more daintily and enjoyably done. Mr Lang outdid all the prodigies of those who, like the old conjurers, "with their hair on end at their own wonders, wonder for their bread." His villain was more unutterably villanous, his expedients more de lightfully impossible, than anything that ever had come from the press of Arrowsmith. There is a certain episode concerning some Jaffa oranges which has always chilled our blood. The operator in this case intends to get rid of the heroine, who is in his way. She is recovering from a fever, and apt to be thirsty, as is not unusual. Mr Crawley takes advantage of his opportunity, and prepares for her under the following unlikely form the final dose. First, he buys a basket of very fine Jaffa oranges; then a small phial marked PoISON, -"which it may be as well," says the romancer, careful of possible consequences, "not to name"; then a hypodermic syringe,-all at different places and under different pretences. Coming in, he draws down the blinds, stuffs his pockethandkerchief into the keyhole, lays the hearthrug across the considerable chink which, as is usual, admitted a healthy draught under the bottom of the door," and proceeded with his preparations. "He set them out on the table in order-the oranges, the phial, and the hypodermic syringe. Then he carefully examined the oranges, chose half-a-dozen of the best, and laid the others on a large dessert-plate in the dining-room cupboard. One orange he ate, and left the skin on a plate on the table in company with a biscuit or two. "When all this had been arranged to his mind, Mr Crawley chose another orange, filled a wine-glass with the liquid in the phial, and them drew off a quantity in the little syringe. Then he very delicately and carefully punctured the skin of one of the the contents of the syringe. This oranges, and injected into the fruit operation he elaborately completed in the case of each of the six chosen oranges, and then tenderly polished their coats with a portion of the skin of the fruit he had eaten. That portion of the skin he consumed to dust in the fire; and observing that a strong odour remained in the room, he deliberately turned on the unlighted gas for a few minutes. After this he opened the window, sealed his own seal in red wax on paper a great many times, finally burning the collection, and lit a large cigar, which he smoked through, with every appearance of enjoyment. While engaged on this portion of his task he helped himself frequently to sherry from the glass, first carefully rinsed, into which he had poured the liquid from the now unlabelled phial. Lastly, he put the phial in his pocket with the little syringe, stored the six oranges, wrapped in delicate paper, within the basket, and closed the window. Next he unlocked the door, and without opening it, remarked in a sweet voice, Now, Alice, you may come in."" It has curdled our blood, as we have said, many times since, to think, What became of these Jaffa oranges? Are they still about the world, or have they in the course of time gone bad, and passed innocuously away? There is no answer to this thrilling question, neither will we inform the reader what was the final outcome of these preparations. Let him get the Mark of Cain,' and read for himself: or if it is not to be had, let him make the life of his bookseller a miserable one, until pressure is put upon the mysterious headquarters of so much murder and miracle at Bristol, and another edition is forthcoming. He will not easily find a more delightful piece of literary mystification. There is no mystification about Mr Rider Haggard. He is the to one of the invaders; but in She' it is more romantic, being all mixed with a very weird and uncanny kind of love-making. It is no doubt a sort of resurrection that has taken place in this new writer. The fancy of the public has been lately turned, by one of those impulses which periodically sway human sentiment, to the art of the storyteller, which; perhaps, had fallen a little out of repute, dimmed by the modern art of character-painting and analysis. We need scarcely inquire, for we could give no satisfactory answer, what has brought it back. Something entirely inadequate, no doubt, after the use and wont of human things: for neither Mr Rider Haggard nor Mr Stevenson can claim to have been the instrument of the change. It was there before those who were born to supply it. As likely as anything it was Mr Hugh Conway who first struck the rock, though by what right no man can tell; certainly he was no prophet that he should do this thing. But whatever the means, the thing has been done; and now it is not the fine discussion of means and motive, the portrait long-drawn out and endless of internal doubts and fears, but a lively outside story, which is the best charm to conjure withal. It cannot be pretended that Mr Rider Haggard has either the grim force of Gulliver, or that amazing calm matter-of-fact reality with which Defoe impresses himself upon us, with an unimaginative power almost more telling than imagination. The methods of the new raconteur are not refined, nor his inspiration of any more ethereal kind than that of mingling experience and invention into a stirring tale. Neither satire nor criticism of life is in the strain. His object is to There is, inevitably we suppose, a certain amount of resemblance between this wonderful tale and its predecessor. There was a map to guide the investigators in the one case; there is a potsherd with a Greek inscription in the other. In King Solomon's Mines' the motive was stronger, for it was the recovery of hidden treasure and of a kingdom 1 She: A History of Adventure. By H. Rider Haggard. London: Longmans, Green, & Ca. work in as many marvels as possible, with so many realities as to make the whole look as if it might have been, which is an effort much more difficult than that of the writer who flings himself into the person of his hero, and feels and lives with him. Mr Rider Haggard has not proved as yet that he has anything that can be called imagination at all; but invention he has of the most robust kind, such as may afford a certain amount of pleasure to everybody who reads, and which probably impresses the masses more than the most poetic fancy. 'She' is one of the wildest of prosaic conceptions. She is an enchantress who has established an empire in the interior of Africa, unknown to history or tradition, unsuspected by the geographers, a mysterious region which contains the central fountain, or rather fire, of life, in which having bathed she is immortal-or rather comparatively immortal, for there are limits to all things; and up to the time at which the story begins, this personage has lived and reigned only a trifle over 2000 years. Notwithstanding this respectable period of duration, she is still as full of all the arts of coquetry as if she were a young lady of the nineteenth century; although we are given to understand that she has been supported during the whole of the double millennium by a desperate passion, the love of a man whom she herself killed 390 B.C., and for whose return to this world she has been all the time waiting. If the reincarnation of souls is accomplished only at such long intervals, and if the second life is to be lived in the same or an exactly similar person to that which embodied the first, the doctrine of Pythagoras becomes of less difficult acceptance; and this, so far as he means it at all, would seem to be Mr Rider Haggard's theory. For when the young hero, directed thereto by the vengeful instructions of an Egyptian ancestress, daughter of one of the early Pharaohs, forces his way into the kingdom of the enchantress, he is received by her with impassioned delight as the very Kallikrates whom she stabbed several centuries before the Christian era. Naturally this brings about certain complications; for the mission upon which the youth was sent, following many unsuccessful ventures on the part of his remote ancestors from that period downwards, was to kill the sorceress and avenge his great-grandpapa. But instead of doing this he falls instantly in love with her, as does his friend and guardian, the teller of the tale: and if nothing had intervened, instead of vengeance there must have followed only an ecstatic honeymoon, and the reunion of the two souls which were severed by the rash act of the lady 2300 years before. But this, of course, could not be permitted to be. The reader will easily perceive that, for a strong and daring inventor, without the aid of a poetic imagination, the situation is a very startling one. It would not, perhaps, have been less difficult had he been a poet, but the difficulties would have been of a different kind. No fine web of fate or tragic impossibility comes between. The old siren, who all through looks very much like an actress in a féerie, instead of being arrested by some subtle action of the unseen powers, or stayed by an irresistible destiny at the moment of her apparent triumph, only makes a ludicrous mistake, and perishes in a sort of explosion of fireworks in hideous. decrepitude and disgust, shrivelling up into the semblance of an old monkey, she who had been the most beautiful of all women ever seen. Everything about the catastrophe is manqué. The journey to the centre of life is attended by horrors which suggest stage carpentry more than anything real; and the plank which is carefully carried all the way to be placed over a gap in a tremendous chasm, where the wind is always raving, and where that prosaic bridge has to be thrown between a spur of unsteady rock and a loggan-stone, has surely been invented with some idea of future use in a pantomime. Only once in the twentyfour hours does a ray of sunshine penetrate the blackness of this too awful gulf, and that moment, of course, has to be taken advantage of for the crossing. We recommend it to the attention of Mr Irving. It might be wrought up into an unparalleled stage effect but it is rather a failure in pen and ink. The more fearful and wonderful such circumstances are intended to be, the more absurd is the failure of them. We are, alas! not at all alarmed by the plight of Messrs Holly and Vincey, even when they return alone from their sublime adventure. It excites our interest much more to hear how they are to fare at the hands of their savage escort when they come back without the queen, who alone has kept these savages in order. That commends itself to us as a real danger: the other is mere pasteboard and fireworks. But the shipwreck of the dhow; the sudden wild squall in the midst of the fierce tropical moonlight; the escape across lines of breakers to the savage unknown coast; the voyage up the river into the wild solitudes and dismal swamps,—are a very different matter. The one may not, perhaps, so far as we can tell, be any more real than the other; but it looks like truth and truth most picturesquely and vividly set forth. The pilgrims have been enjoying the coolness of the night on the deck of the dhow, when they are roused, in the midst of a doze, by the following incident: : "I remember no more, till sudden ly a frightful roar of wind, a shriek of terror from the awakening crew, and a whip-like sting of water in our faces. Some of the men ran to let go the haulyards and lower the sail, but the parrel jammed, and the yard would not come down. I sprang to my feet and hung on to a rope. The sky aft was dark as pitch; but the moon still shone brightly ahead of us, and lit up the blackness. Beneath its sheen a huge white-topped breaker, twenty feet high or more, was rushing on to us. It was on the break: the moon shone on its crest and tipped its foam with light. On it rushed beneath the inky sky, driven by the awful squall behind it. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, I saw the black shape of the whale-boat cast high into the air on the crest of the breaking wave. Then-a shock of water, a wild rush of boiling foam, and I was clinging for my life to the shroud,-ay, swept straight out from it like a flag in a gale. We were pooped. "The wave passed. It seemed to me that I was under water for minutes-really it was seconds. I looked forward. The blast had torn out the great sail, and high in the air it was fluttering away to leeward like a huge wounded bird." After they have managed (quite miraculously, we should say) to get into the attendant whale-boat, with its air-tight compartments, further dangers arise : : "The furious tempest drove over and round us, flinging the boat this way and that; the winds and the storm-wreath and the sheets of stinging spray blinded and bewildered us; but through it all we worked like demons, with the wild exhilaration of despair-for even despair can exhilarate. One minute, three minutes, six minutes! The boat began to lighten, and no fresh wave swamped |