Wordsworth, again, should hardly be spoken of as one
who 'was not, in the general, a man from whom human sympathies welled
profusely,' but this criticism is as nothing compared to the passage
where Mr. Robertson tells us that the scene between Arthur and Hubert in
King John is not true to nature because the child's pleadings for his
life are playful as well as piteous. Indeed, Mr. Robertson, forgetting
Mamillius as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly
that Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature.
Paradoxes are always charming, but judgments such as these are not
paradoxical; they are merely provincial.

On the whole, Mr. Robertson's book will not do. It is, we fully admit,
an industrious compilation, but it is not an anthology, it is not a
selection of the best, for it lacks the discrimination and good taste
which is the essence of selection, and for the want of which no amount of
industry can atone. The child-poems of our literature have still to be
edited.

The Children of the Poets: An Anthology from English and American Writers
of Three Generations. Edited, with an Introduction, by Eric S.
Robertson. (Walter Scott.)

NEW NOVELS

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 28, 1886.)

Astray: A Tale of a Country Town, is a very serious volume. It has taken
four people to write it, and even to read it requires assistance. Its
dulness is premeditated and deliberate and comes from a laudable desire
to rescue fiction from flippancy. It is, in fact, tedious from the
noblest motives and wearisome through its good intentions. Yet the story
itself is not an uninteresting one. Quite the contrary. It deals with
the attempt of a young doctor to build up a noble manhood on the ruins of
a wasted youth. Burton King, while little more than a reckless lad,
forges the name of a dying man, is arrested and sent to penal servitude
for seven years. On his discharge he comes to live with his sisters in a
little country town and finds that his real punishment begins when he is
free, for prison has made him a pariah. Still, through the nobility and
self-sacrifice of his life, he gradually wins himself a position, and
ultimately marries the prettiest girl in the book. His character is, on
the whole, well drawn, and the authors have almost succeeded in making
him good without making him priggish. The method, however, by which the
story is told is extremely tiresome. It consists of an