Gifted with a rare variety of talents, Lover heartily enjoyed the exercise of each, and found his chief pleasure in their development.  He worked incessantly at painting, writing or musical composition—­worked for love of the work, not from uneasy effort or outside pressure.  In this respect he presents a happy contrast to his fellow-countryman and brother-humorist Charles Lever, whose biography, published some months ago, left a painful impression on the mind in its view of a man of genuine talent and attractive qualities living in a feverish way and writing constantly against his inclination, too often below his powers.  As writers the two stand side by side.  Lover had more versatility of talent, taking him partly outside the field of literature.  He made the most of his powers:  nothing which he has written gives the idea that he might have done it better.  He was a poet, which Lever was not, and had an easy command of versification and language.  His songs, while they show no high poetic qualities, are excellent of their kind, and his facility in turning an impromptu verse is shown in this scrap from the book before us in praise of a friend and physician: 

  Whene’er your vitality
  Is feeble in quality,
  And you fear a fatality
    May end the strife,
  Then Dr. Joe Dickson
  Is the man I would fix on
  For putting new wicks on
    The lamp of life.

In his stories Lover relied less on drollery of incident and indulged more in play upon words than Lever, but the humor of both is essentially of the same kind and drawn from the same source.  Compared with much of our American humor, it has a spontaneousness, and above all a lovable quality, that ours lacks.  The boy who has laughed over Lorrequer and Handy Andy is apt to look back at them not merely with amusement, but with a feeling of camaraderie and even tenderness.  He has laughed with them as well as at them—­has somehow gained through the laughter a glimpse of the writer which inspires liking and respect.

New England Bygones.  By E.H.  Arr.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co.

E.H.  Arr has produced a very pleasant book by a simple effort of memory.  By letting the mind’s eye travel back carefully and vigilantly over the scenes of a youth passed in a rural part of New England, and taking notes of its journey, she has made a graphic picture of life in that corner of the country forty years ago.  Not a few men and women who were “raised” there have carried away, bit for bit, the same reminiscences, so exactly does one New England landscape resemble another, in details of foreground at least.  The same description of orchard, stone walls or old well will fit any farm in Maine or Massachusetts, and fond recollection sniffs the same odor of sputtering doughnuts through the kitchen-door, whether it carries one back to the Green hills or the White.  Recollections are alike, but impressions differ, one class of minds