ficulty that we all have to face in life is not so much the
science of cookery as the stupidity of cooks. And in this little
handbook to practical Epicureanism the tyrant of the English kitchen is
shown in her proper light. Her entire ignorance of herbs, her passion
for extracts and essences, her total inability to make a soup which is
anything more than a combination of pepper and gravy, her inveterate
habit of sending up bread poultices with pheasants,--all these sins and
many others are ruthlessly unmasked by the author. Ruthlessly and
rightly. For the British cook is a foolish woman who should be turned
for her iniquities into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to
use.

But our author is not local merely. He has been in many lands; he has
eaten back-hendl at Vienna and kulibatsch at St. Petersburg; he has had
the courage to face the buffalo veal of Roumania and to dine with a
German family at one o'clock; he has serious views on the right method of
cooking those famous white truffles of Turin of which Alexandre Dumas was
so fond; and, in the face of the Oriental Club, declares that Bombay
curry is better than the curry of Bengal. In fact he seems to have had
experience of almost every kind of meal except the 'square meal' of the
Americans. This he should study at once; there is a great field for the
philosophic epicure in the United States. Boston beans may be dismissed
at once as delusions, but soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks,
blue fish and the pompono of New Orleans are all wonderful delicacies,
particularly when one gets them at Delmonico's. Indeed, the two most
remarkable bits of scenery in the States are undoubtedly Delmonico's and
the Yosemite Valley; and the former place has done more to promote a good
feeling between England and America than anything else has in this
century.

We hope the 'Wanderer' will go there soon and add a chapter to _Dinners
and Dishes_, and that his book will have in England the influence it
deserves. There are twenty ways of cooking a potato and three hundred
and sixty-five ways of cooking an egg, yet the British cook, up to the
present moment, knows only three methods of sending up either one or the
other.

_Dinners and Dishes_. By 'Wanderer.' (Simpkin and Marshall.)

SHAKESPEARE ON SCENERY
(_Dramatic Review_, March 14, 1885.)

I have often heard people wonder what Shakespeare would say, could he see
Mr. Irving's production of his _Muc