The Sun.
London, England, 1855-02-19 00:00:00

RAILWAY RUBBISH-BOOKS.

8;
Spence.rlitloe
sitiyngol„. Friend ? Piper, Stephenson, and
to Laugh At.
a little
and One By A,
.
whol© IV. Cole. James
Blackwood.
By J. U. Friswell.
some of thecontributorst
wisicehbhyvaov:mew
Twelve
jS'e eersalllßl ssliaedacesko‘avn s back volume was issued
was
candidly
entitled
byo
its writers " A Shilling's w ,
ortia of Nonsense. '
El ere, however, in one of the
half-crown's worth
publications above
particularised,fprottmilcitt_hetiiperwes
foisted upon the public rather more disineenuously)
_if we mistake not, by some of the contributors to
Diogenes. Everything in the book, from the first
page to the hundred and twelfth, breathes of hav-
ing been produced with malice prepense and afore-
thought, for the expresspurposeof being ridiculous.
Artists and writers aro evidently of that genus the
members of which are funny to order—wags em- •
ployed for the public as certain jesters were of
" by the more empty-headed of
yore, our ancient
sovereigns. Shall we call them by their right
names—Buffoons? or designate them as they are
designated by Shakspere and the old dra-
matists ? namely, by a very precise
and
accurately descriptive monosyllable. 'Whatever
they may be termed Fools, Jesters, or
Buffoons—as the Clown says in the Pantomime,
—Hero they are ! They have donned the motley
and duly painted their visages of the becoming pie-
bald, and, in a trice, for the small sum of half a-
crown, are tumbling before her Majesty's
lieges—
grinning through horse-collars and performing all
manner of absurdities. Aevays„ remember, to
order ! Always like that meanest of parasites
_the rich man's jokel— invited to the
feast to set the worthier guests a-laughing.
Honestly we have a horror of these deliberate, and
at best but lukewarm, hashes of utterly inane
facetiousness these gandly-coloured and gro-
tesquely illustrated volumes of vapid and shallow
fun—to our mind no fun et all, but sheer stark-
staring folly. "Something to Laugh At,,, for-
sooth ! Something rather fora higher intelligence to
lament as wholly frivolous, and, if not actually
drivelling, entirely prepostereus and extravagant.
Scarcely anything out of all this mass of twaddling
letterpress and ill-drawn embellishment rises above
the dead level. of the mere nonsensical. If
we except, perhaps, , for their ultra absur-
dity, two or three sketches of a certain obese
Wight pursued by a mad bull through the
meadows. As where—his enemy charging after
him in the di stance—you are shown the unfortu-
nate struggling to escape through a small aperture
in the, garden wall—an aperture so r:dianlouely
small as to admit only of his head and shoulders.
Or, more absurdly still, where—on the
other side of the same wall—you are shown
the horror-atricken expreseion of the wretch's
countenance—suggestive, in the midst of wriggling
and dismay, of what may be happening all the
while to his unseen 11101ety ! With minute excep-
t tions of the merely ludicrous, such as in these in-
stances of the very coarsest caricaturing—
productions like those hero spread out be-
fore us are only distinguished by their inanity
and their senseless extravagance. " Something to