or
islet of newspaper in the centre, with that freedom of mind (in my case
meaning freedom to forget) which would be a perilous way of preparing
for examination. This _ad libitum_ perusal had its interest for me. The
private truth being that I had not read 'The Channel Islands,' I was
amazed at the variety of matter which the volume must contain to have
impressed these different judges with the writer's surpassing capacity
to handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of presentation.
In Jersey she had shown herself an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in
Alderney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist: there were
sketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our
"fictionists" to the blush; the style was eloquent and racy, studded
with gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout was so
superior that, said one, "the recording angel" (who is not supposed to
take account of literature as such) "would assuredly set down the work
as a deed of religion." The force of this eulogy on the part of several
reviewers was much heightened by the incidental evidence of their
fastidious and severe taste, which seemed to suffer considerably from
the imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canonised: one
afflicted them with the smell of oil, another lacked erudition and
attempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with trivial conceits, one
wanted to be more philosophical than nature had made him, another in
attempting to be comic produced the melancholy effect of a half-starved
Merry-Andrew; while one and all, from the author of the 'Areopagitica'
downwards, had faults of style which must have made an able hand in the
'Latchgate Argus' shake the many-glanced head belonging thereto with a
smile of compassionate disapproval. Not so the authoress of 'The Channel
Islands:' Vorticella and Shakspere were allowed to be faultless. I
gathered that no blemishes were observable in the work of this
accomplished writer, and the repeated information that she was "second
to none" seemed after this superfluous. Her thick octavo--notes,
appendix and all--was unflagging from beginning to end; and the 'Land's
End Times,' using a rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended you
not to take up the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at a
sitting. It had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for many
a long day--a sentence which had a melancholy resonance, suggesting a
life of st