It is really a very charming book, and though Dryden, Betterton, and Wills’s Coffee-House are dragged in rather a propos de bottes, still the picture of the time is well painted.  Joyce, the little Puritan maiden, is an exquisite creation, and Hugo Wharncliffe, her lover, makes a fine hero.  The sketch of Algernon Sidney is rather colourless, but Charles II. is well drawn.  It seems to be a novel with a high purpose and a noble meaning.  Yet it is never dull.

Mrs. Macquoid’s Louisa is modern and the scene is in Italy.  Italy, we fear, has been a good deal overdone in fiction.  A little more Piccadilly and a little less Perugia would be a relief.  However, the story is interesting.  A young English girl marries an Italian nobleman and, after some time, being bored with picturesqueness, falls in love with an Englishman.  The story is told with a great deal of power and ends properly and pleasantly.  It can safely be recommended to young persons.

(1) In the Golden Days.  By Edna Lyall, Author of We Two, Donovan, etc.  (Hurst and Blackett.)

(2) Louisa.  By Katherine S. Macquoid. (Bentley and Son.)

HENRY THE FOURTH AT OXFORD

(Dramatic Review, May 23, 1885.)

I have been told that the ambition of every Dramatic Club is to act Henry IV.  I am not surprised.  The spirit of comedy is as fervent in this play as is the spirit of chivalry; it is an heroic pageant as well as an heroic poem, and like most of Shakespeare’s historical dramas it contains an extraordinary number of thoroughly good acting parts, each of which is absolutely individual in character, and each of which contributes to the evolution of the plot.

Rumour, from time to time, has brought in tidings of a proposed production by the banks of the Cam, but it seems at the last moment Box and Cox has always had to be substituted in the bill.

To Oxford belongs the honour of having been the first to present on the stage this noble play, and the production which I saw last week was in every way worthy of that lovely town, that mother of sweetness and of light.  For, in spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisector, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.  Indeed, in most other towns art has often to present herself in the form of a reaction against the sordid ugliness of ignoble lives, but at Oxford she comes to us as an exquisite flower born of the beauty of life and expressive of life’s joy.  She finds her home by the Isis as once she did by the Ilissus; the Magdalen walks and the Magdalen cloisters are as dear to her as were ever the silver olives of Colonus and the golden gateway of the house