The Walery-Gallery Co.--for WALERY has transformed himself into a
Limited Liability--is bringing out a series of "Sporting Celebrities,"
with sporting notes, monographs, and dramatic notes too. The photographs
are excellent. Two in each monthly number. The monographs are right
enough, but the sporting and dramatic notes in a monthly, are either not
sufficient or too much. Three portraits and three monographs, one
sportswoman and two sportsmen in each number would be better, at least,
so it seems to the learned Baron, who would sum up the requisites for
making the Walery-Gallery Sporting Series a success in a Shakspearian
quotation, adapted for this special occasion,--"More art and less
matter."
The Baron is always much interested in the _Revue de Famille_, directed
and largely contributed to by M. JULES SIMON, who is also a pretty
regular contributor to its pages. In December last, M. SIMON wrote a
thoughtful and interesting article on _L'Education des Femmes_, and M.
FRANCISQUE SARCEY, a very amusing paper on _Le Timide au Théâtre_. The
number for February (it is only a bi-monthly publication) has a paper on
_L'Influence_ (not the influenza) _des Femmes en France_, the only fault
of which is its length; and GYP gives a satirical sketch called _Nos
Docteurs_, which hardly seems in keeping with the family character of
the _Revue_. The March Number is now out, and can be procured at
HACHETTE'S. It is one of the best French serials.
A delightful book is _Yorkshire Legends and Traditions_, collected and
recounted by the Rev. THOMAS PARKINSON. He who writes of fairies and of
witches should of course possess some potent spell--(how many members of
the School-Board, had they lived a couple of hundred years ago, would
have been punished as witches for teaching "spelling," it is pleasant to
imagine)--and Mr. PARKINSON'S great charm is his apparent belief in the
wonders he relates. Even when he occasionally alludes to "popular
superstition," you feel it is only a phrase introduced evidently out of
consideration for the unphilosophic prejudices of his "so-called"
Nineteenth-Century readers, who pride themselves on being HUXLEYS in the
full blaze of scientific light, and yet would shrink from passing a
night in a haunted room, or, if alone, would go a mile out of their way
to avoid an uncanny spot. The greatest mistake made by narrators of the
marvellous is attempting to account for the unaccountable. This book is,
I believe, one of a series now being published by ELLIOT STOCK, of
Paternoster Row, a stock which Your Own Baron recommends as a safe
investment, for the book alone is a good dividend, the interest being
kept up all through; and it is satisfactory to hear that, as the other
counties of England, and perhaps of Ireland and Scotland, are being
dealt with in a similar manner, there is a good reserve-fund of
information and amusement.
Mr. RUNCIMAN, in _The Fortnightly_, brings a serious indictment of
plagiarism against Mr. RIDER HAGGARD, which it strikes me he would be
unable to sustain in a Court of Common Sense before MR. PRESIDENT PUNCH,
unless it were first laid down as a fixed principle, that a writer of
fiction must never have recourse to any narrative of facts whereon to
base his Romance.