In the English Illustrated Magazine, for this month, I have just read a most interesting account of a visit paid by the Very Rev. Dean of Gloucester to the Trappist Monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, which, thanks to the marvellous spirit of the Order known as Chartreuse Verte or Chartreuse Jaune, is one of the Religious Confraternities not suppressed by the Anti-monkical majority in the French Government.  The Baron—­the umble individual who now addresses you—­has himself entered within these Monastic walls, inspected the buildings, seen all the monastic practical jokes, known as “regular cells,” and has come away the better for the visit, with much food for reflection and refection en route in the voiture, and with spirituous comfort in green and yellow bottles.  This paper, in the New Illustrated, is well worth reading.

The Baron has for some weeks had on his table, Golden Lines; The Story of a Woman’s Courage, by FREDERICK WICKS.  The Baron being, as he is bound to admit, almost human, was warned off the book by its title, which seems to suggest something in the tract line.  The Publishers’ name (BLACKWOOD) is, however, an invariable stamp of good metal.  So the Baron picked up the book, was attracted by the remarkably clever illustrations, and finally, beginning at the beginning, he read to the end.  It is a novel, and one of the best published this season; and all the better for being in one stout handsomely-printed volume.  The plot is constructed with rare skill, the writing is good, and the people all alive.  If it is WICKS’s first work (and the Baron never heard of FREDERICK before) he should go on making candles of the same kind.  Their illuminating power is rare.

“What shall we play at, and how shall we play it?” The satisfactory answer to these two questions, specially important at Christmas time, will be found in Professor HOFFMANN’s Encyclopaedia of Card and Table Games, published by ROUTLEDGE.  Here you will learn the mysteries of “Go-Bang,” “Reverse,”—­and after learning the latter, you, if Nature has blessed you with a tuneful voice, will be able to sing with GEORGE GROSSMITH (if he’ll let you), “See me Reverse.”  The motto for the Professor’s book should have been the emphatic exclamation of the street Arab, “My heye! such games!”

This is the sixth year of Hazell’s Annual.  Whatever information you require it will be difficult not to find in Hazell, clearly and not at all Hazelly expressed.  A youthful friend whose pun, says the Baron, I hereby nail to the counter, on seeing this book on my desk, observed, “Yes, I’m nuts on HAZELL.”  The Baron frowned, and the youth withered away, as ALICE did—­not the one who went to Wonderland, but an elder ALICE, whom our old friend “BEN BOLT” remembers.

SAMPSON LOW, & CO. publish “Wild Life on a Tidal Water,” by P.H.  EMERSON, who gives the adventures of a house-boat and her crew on Breydon Water in Norfolk; the photo-etchings are by EMERSON and GOODALL, “and therefore,” says the Baron, “All-good.”