“Next, please!” How Stanley Wrote his Darkest Africa.  By Mr. E. MARSTON.  A most interesting little book, published by SAMPSON LOW & Co., illustrated with excellent photographs, and with a couple of light easy sketches, by, I suppose, the Author, which makes the Baron regret that he didn’t do more of them.  “Buy it,” says the Baron.  The Baron recommends the perusal of this little book, if only to understand the full meaning of the old proverbial expression “Going on a wild-goose chase.”  The author is a wonderfully rapid-act traveller.  He apparently can “run” round every principal city in Europe and see everything that’s worth seeing in it in about an hour and a half at most.  In this manner, and by not comprehending a word of the language wherever he is, or at all events only a very few of the words, he continues to pick up much curious information which probably would be novel to slower coaches than himself.

Interesting account of JOSEF ISRAELS in the Magazine of Art; but his portrait makes him look gigantic, which JOSEF is in Art, but not in stature.  Those who “know not JOSEF,” if any such there be, will learn much about him, and desire to know more.  “Baroness,” says the Baron, “you are right:  let Hostesses and all dinner-givers read ’Some Humours of the Cuisine’ in The Woman’s World.”  The parodies of the style of Mr. PATER, and of a translation of a Tolstoian Romance in The Cornhill Magazine, are capital.  In the same number, “Farmhouse Notes” are to The Baron like the Rule of Three in the ancient rhyme to the youthful student,—­“it puzzles me.”  It includes a few anecdotes of some Farm’ous Persons; so perhaps the title is a crypto-punnygraph.

All Etonians should possess The English Illustrated Magazine (MACMILLAN’S), 1889-90, for the sake of the series of papers and the pictures of Eton College.  There is also an interesting paper on the Beefsteak Room at the Lyceum by FREDERICK HAWKINS.  Delightful Beefsteak Room!  What pleasant little suppers—­But no matter—­my supper time is past—­“Too late, too late, you cannot enter here,” ought to be the warning inscribed over every Club or other supper-room, addressed chiefly to those who are of the Middle Ages, as is the mediaeval

BARON DE BOOK-WORMS.

* * * * *

FASHIONS IN PHYSIC.

    [The President of the British Pharmaceutical Conference lately
    drew attention to the prevalence of fashion in medicine.]

  A fashion in physic, like fashions in frills: 
  The doctors at one time are mad upon pills;
  And crystalline principles now have their day,
  Where alkaloids once held an absolute sway. 
  The drugs of old times might be good, but it’s true,
  We discard them in favour of those that are new.

  The salts and the senna have vanished, we fear,
  As the poet has said, like the snows of last year;
  And where is the mixture in boyhood we quaff’d,
  That was known by the ominous name of Black Draught? 
  While Gregory’s Powder has gone, we are told,
  To the limbo of drugs that are worn out and old.