LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7778, 4 February 1891, Page 6

LITERARY GOSSIP.

The account given by the late Mc P. L James of his travels In Somalilaud was so well received when first published that we need do little else than mention the aopeatance of a second edition of " The Unknown Horn of Africa" (George Phillip and Son). The author, who promised to become one of our f oremo3t explorers, was killed by a wounded elephant at San Benito in April last. Charles Lamb tells us to love the early Quakers, and Mrs Barr seems to have laid this Injunction to heart. In "Friend Olivia " (James Clarke and Co.) she makes a most attractive romance out of the story of some of Georsce Fox's followers. Fox himself plays an important part in the tale. Wβ see him first at the house of his friend Roger Prideaux, Olivia's I father, and afterwards at Hampton Court, exhorting; Cromwell to do justice to the Quakers in prison. At Hampton Court, J too, Mistress Olivia, who has gone thither to intercede with the Protector for her father, recites the last words of James Naylor, the much-injured man whose patience and " beautifullest humility" Lamb admired. Nor does the story end till after the Restoration, and Olivia visits another and very different Court, where her serene beauty produces a happier effect on the gay monarch than ladies' charms were wont to excite. It is really Anastasia de Burgh, however, and not the fair Quaker, wbo is the heroine. Her character, we are sorry to say, is very far from perfection; but with all her faults she can be very fascinating. Of course, believers in the divine right of kings will find a good deal to object to in the book; but otherwise it is a capital story, and in every way worthy of the hand which wrote "Jan Tedder's Wife." Bret Harte's latest story of San Francleo—" A Ward of Golden Gate " (Chatto and Windus)—shows us quite a modern aspect of life in the Far West. The chief characters are a rising politician, the Hon. Paul Hathaway, and the beautiful heiress, the Dona Maria Concepcion de la Yerba Buena. Colonel Pendleton, of Kentucky, a high-minded old gentleman, who stifi travels about with a case of duelling pistols, should also be mentioned. The plot turns chiefly on the doubt as the heroine's relationship to a certain Kate Howard, whose character and antecedents will not bear looking into. The Hon. Paul may doubtless be taken as a favourable specimen of the American statesman; and the Colonel is a fine character—an interesting survival of the old days, " the days of men, sir, when a man's word was enough for anything, and bis trigger* finger settled any doubt."