owed
her.'

Everything ends happily. Jack arrives in England just in time to prevent
Dr. Josiah Brown from mesmerising Violet whom the cunning doctor is
anxious to marry, and he hurls his rival out of the window. The victim
is discovered 'bruised and bleeding among the broken flower-pots' by a
comic policeman. Mrs. Parkinson still believes in spiritualism, but
refuses to have anything to do with Brown as she discovers that the
deceased Alderman's 'materialised beard' was made only of 'horrid, coarse
horsehair.' Jack and Violet are married at last and Jack is horrid
enough to send to 'La-ki-wa' another photograph. The end of Dr. Brown is
chronicled above. Had we not known what was in store for him we should
hardly have got through the book. There is a great deal too much padding
in it about Dr. Slade and Dr. Bartram and other mediums, and the
disquisitions on the commercial future of Newfoundland seem endless and
are intolerable. However, there are many publics, and Mr. Stuart
Cumberland is always sure of an audience. His chief fault is a tendency
to low comedy; but some people like low comedy in fiction.

The Vasty Deep: A Strange Story of To-day. By Stuart Cumberland.
(Sampson Low and Co.)

THE POETS' CORNER--X

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 24, 1889.)

Is Mr. Alfred Austin among the Socialists? Has somebody converted the
respectable editor of the respectable National Review? Has even dulness
become revolutionary? From a poem in Mr. Austin's last volume this would
seem to be the case. It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too
seriously. Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of
prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference. But
since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was
begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully
representative of Mr. Austin's mature views. He gives us, at any rate,
in its somewhat lumbering and pedestrian verses, his conception of the
perfect state:

Fearless, unveiled, and unattended
Strolled maidens to and fro:
Youths looked respect, but never bended
Obsequiously low.

And each with other, sans condition,
Held parley brief or long,
Without provoking _coarse suspicion
Of marriage_, or of wrong.

All were well clad, and none were better,
And gems beheld I none,
Save where there hung a jewelled fetter,
Symbolic, in the sun.

I sa