BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXV, Issue IX, 1 September 1900, Page 411

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

“THE BATH COMEDY.” Who ever wants an hour or two of thorough amusement would do well to road this book. It is certainly very entertaining, and, though almost within the line of farce, it is farce of a refined order. This comedy in narrative form takes place in the last half of the last century, and the scenes are laid in Bath when Bath was the resort of the fashionable and frivolous. The action of the piece begins and ends within the compass of three days, and never surely were three days so full of laughter-pro-voking incidents. The charmingly incorrigible little widow, who first sets the train of incidents moving, and who keeps them moving with the liveliest audacity, has her quickwitted attractiveness brought out in piquant contrast to the sweetly beautiful and plaintive Lady Standish. The four leading men in the comedy, Sir Jasper, Denis O’Hara, Lord Verney, and Stafford, are all distinct types, and lend themselves admirably in their contrasting characters to make, every' page full of amusing interest. The clever authors of “The Bath Comedy” are to be congratulated on producing a book which, in addition to being wholesome and wellwritten, cannot fail to be very popular among a generation whose first demand of its literature is that it should be amusing.

“BLACK HE.VBT AND WHITE HEART.” Central Africa, and South Central Africa provide the stage on which are enacted the three dramas of terrible hair-lifting adventure in this somewhat bulky volume. But we naturally expect this, seeing that Mr Rider Haggard is the author of them, for did he not discover those places to the world as an inexhaustible store-house of wonderful material for making stories of a kind that fascinate the average imagination? Those who have read —and who has not? —“The Adventures of Allan Quatermain,” will have a fairly good idea of what they will find in this .new book from the pen of “Allan's” author. All the three stories are highly dramatic and fuU of stirring incidents, though, to do their author justice, 1 must confess that they are far beneath the work he has produced in such books “Jess” and “Beatrice.” The first of the two longest (stories in this volume, “Elissa,” treats of the adventures of a grandson of King Solomon three thousand years ago in the city of Zimboe in South Central Africa—an inland Phoenician city, the ruins of which attest at this present day its long past greatness. The other two stories show us respectively two very different types of civilised man in contact with savage races, and are every whit as full of interest as “Elissa.” “FOUR MONTHS BESIEGED.” I had read so much in the daily newspapers and the illustrated English journals, concerning that long and plucky defence of the unfortified little town in the far north of Natal that, on taking up this book for the first time, I felt tempted to exclaim,

“No more Ladysmith for me at present." But once I bad dipped into it, 1 speedily got absorbed in Mr Pearse’s graphic and simple description of how life went ou upon aud within the horseshoe-shaped enclosure of hills from whence the British guns talked back to the Boers' heavy artillery. There is a tremendous difference between trying to form exact notions of what the siege of Ladysmith was like from fragmentary and disjointed newspaper accounts and carefully reading a succinct and connected story, such as this, with the aid of the explanatory maps scattered through the l>ook to guide one into a proper understanding of the tactics of offence and defence, and a right appreciation of the gallantry of the various sorties. One quite forgets in reading that many of the facts narrated here are not altogether new, and one hails the advent of Lord Duntlonaid and his troopers upon the scene in the last chapter with as much satisfaction as if the relief of Ladysmith were not, at this date, a matter of ancient history.

The August number of the PallMall magazine, just put into my hands, does not fall behind its predecessors in the general excellence of its literary and artistic matter. Frederic VVedmore’s article, “With Constable,” accompanied by charming illustrations from the celebrated painter’s work, will be sure to be read with much iuterest, as will also Rh u y writt en Paper entitled ■twure Famous Collaborators” by George A. Wade. Oxford, t] le , t n< J. rin E> y beautiful, i s graphically enthused over by one of her sons', and the most charming “bits" of her shown m illustration. The fiction in order >Ulnber 18 411 ® f a ver y readable

“The Bath Comedy," by Acne, Castle—Macmillan and Co (Champtaloup and Cooper.) “BUck Heart and White Heart," by Rider Haggard — Longmans. Green, and “Four Months Besieged." by H H S Pearse—Macmillan and Co. (Champtaloun and Cooper.) r