The Sun.
London, England, 1863-06-06 00:00:00

LITERATURE,

The Adventures of a Sporting Dog. Adapted from
the French by Edmund Routledge. Bvo, pp.
155. Routledge and Co.
Our publishers are certainly cultivating author-
ship in earnest. Time was when the most popular
novelist of his age was a bookseller. That fat, old,
apparently common place Richardson, who was one
of the most notable of Dr. Johnson's contemporaries
—the creator of Lovelace, the pathetic narrator of the
history of Clarissa Harlowe, the refined and courtly
delineator of Sir Charles Grandison. There was
William Hone, too, a long while afterwards, who
sold books and wrote them, and who crowned his
rather remarkable career by killing Lord Chan-
cellor Ellenborough by the very poignancy of
his wit and by the ruthless and pitiless cruelty of
his logic. Thomas Miller, in our own time, had
a bookseller's establishment in Newgate-street, if
we remember rightly ; there penning some of the
most readable of the fictions he dealt in. For how
long a time past, is it, that here in London, and
yonder in Edinburgh, two of our most popular
booksellers and publishers have been amongst
the most industrious men of letters of their age
—Charles Knight and Robert Chambers ? The
lest-mentioned having the credit (or the discredit,
shall we call it ?) of writing (anonymously) the
celebrated geological book of scientific scepticism
called " The Vestiges of Creation." The former en-
joying now in his ripe old age the quadruple glory—
of opening up an epoch of cheap literature with " The
Penny Magazine;" of editing with rare ability one
of the best editions of Shakspere ye r, published ; of
conducting to its completion, at a cost of £40,000,
the gigantic work, known now,far and wide in both
hemispheres as "The Penny Cyclopmlia," or, better
still, in its revised form (as recently republished),
as "The National Cyclopeedia ;" and, finally, of
himself writing what will henceforth perpetuate his
name both as a scholar and as a patriot, his" Popular
History of England !" It was only very recently,
indeed, that we had occasion to comment upon the
completion of the initial volume of yet another
history of this country penned by another eminent
publisher, Mr. William Longman, one of the heads
of the great House of Longman and Company.
And this same sympathetic association—already, but
more particularly, as we have seen (and shown
indeed) of late, so often witnessed—appears to be
manifesting itself, now, in the younger genera.
tion, what we may almost (seeing that it has barely
yet begun for itself) call the next generation.
Here in this charming little version of the
wonderfully popular Historiette descriptive of
Les Aventures d'un Chien de Chasse, now
for some time past the delight of the sporting, and
becoming every day, more and more evidently,
that of the non-sporting world in France—here,
we say, in this delectable adaption of this suddenly
famous Novelette, we have proof positive of what
we have just now been saying. Youthful though
the English adapter of the tale is, in years, he is
already, to a certain extent, experienced—he has
undoubtedly here, in thin his last volume, shown
himself to be already skilled—as a man of letters, as
a wielder of the pen, though he can but so very
recently have crossed the scholastic threshold—
to begin life as the son of one of our London pub-
lishers. Several little books of miscellaneous col-
lections (a handbook one of them is to the manly
English game of Cricket) we have observed during
this last year issued from the press in connection
with the name, as writer, editor, or compiler, of
Edmund Routledge. Here unquestionably, how-
ever, is the very best thing the young bookman's
hand has yet attempted, and—more than that,
we will say—accomplished. The charm of the
whole story about the Sporting Dog, Jim,
as told in the original narrative by the
French author, lies in a certain nameless, strange,
indefinable, quaint, quiet subtlety of humour that
Mr. Edmund. Routledge, in adapting the tale to
English readers, has caught as it appears to us
almost magically. It is as impalpable almost in its
way as an aroma, and yet he has contrived to seize and
to impart it, with the full flavour of the original, even
to the translation. The effect produced thus is
hardly less surprising in its way than would be the
retention of its sparkling foam and animation
by a bottle of champagne after having been
decanted. Even in its translated form, therefore,
these "Adventures of the Sporting Dog," the reader
of them will find to be one of those exceptional
books that we laugh over and cry over—that even
the most phlegmatic will, at any rate, chuckle over
and read with moistened eyes. Among all the
natural, comical, cool, impertinent, delightfully
ridiculous dogs ever depicted—whether, we will
even go so far as to say, by the pen of
Shakspeare, or by the brush of Landseer—Jim
will take high rank. As henceforth a dog of fame
he will be regarded as worthy of association,
with the Crab of Launcelot, or with either
of the "Twa Dogs" of Burns—with Sir Walter
Scott's Mustards and Peppers, or with Sir Bulwer
Lytton's Sir Isaac. A wonderfully detightful dog
is Jim, with his yellow eyes like two carbuncles !
Scratching at the door of sour old Gurney (in ad-
vance of his diffident young master, Thibault), and,
when the door is opened, rushing into the room,
and beginning to ferret in all the corners, " with
almost the same amount of curiosity as a broker
levying an execution would display ! " Point-
ing at the game—his ears trembling vio-
lently his tail stuck up ie. the air,
poker-wise his muzzle thrust forward, sniff-
ing at the delightful effluvium—twice passing
his tongue over his face in order to relish more fully
the pleasant odour ! A most delectable canine
rascal is Jim—luring his reluctant master on into
poaching like a very Mephistopheles ! Drinking in
the air of the forest with a sort of rapture—air im-
pregnated, for him, with odours that almost drives
him delirious! Per haps the funniest touch of all in
this droll delineation of Jim, the Sporting dog, is that
in reference to his bearing at the moment when
Baron Übertus has passed one an evening after the
Baron's preserves have been most shamefully
despoiled by Jim. Leaning his forepaws upon one
of the large stones bordering the park, Jim takes a
survey of the property with the greatest assurance.
"In fact," says the writer, as here translated by
Edmund Routledge, " it is very probable that if
Jim had been blessed with two hands, he would,
while staring at the Baron's retreating form, have
applied them to his nose, after the manner of the
dirty little boys of the street !" As to the plot of
the story, we wont breathe here one syllable about it.
Let those who love to read a little book brimming over,
from cover to cover, with emotions of the pathetic
and ridiculous, thread their way through the
mazes of the plot for themselves. Any one who
reads the book,upon our recommendation,will thank
us for the hint thus commending them to it—and
will offer their thanks more especially to Mr. Ed-
mund Routledge, for placing the history of Jim and
his human companions thus readily within their
reach.

MANSION-HGUSE.—For more than a week past the
Lord Mayor has been suffering from an attack of illness,
which during some days confined him to bed, and was at
one time so alarming as to render necessary the presence,
night and day, of his medical attendant. On Tuesday he
was able to leave his bed, and on Wednesday had so far re-
covered as to proceed to Brighton for change of air, hoping,
however, to return to receive the Prince and Princess at
Guildhall on Monday evening.
RAILWAY AND PUBLIC COMPANIES IN PARLIA-
MENT,--Yesterday the examination of Mr, Hawkins, the
traffic manager of the Brighton Railway in opposition to the
proposed new line to Brighton, was continued, Mr,
Watkins, engineer, was examined in the case of the South
Yorkshire and River Dun Company ; and Mr. Hope Scott,
Q.C., replied on the entire case of the Oswestry, Newtown,
and other companies Amalgamation Bill. The case of the
Scottish Central is still proceeding. In the Lords, Messrs.
Robertson, M.P., Price, Bevan, and others were examined
as to traffic and finance.

A Pennsylvania girl, who has been serving as a
soldier in the Federal army of the west for ten months,
says she has discovered a great many females among the
soldiers, one of whom is now a lieutenant. She has assisted
in burying three female soldiers at aifferent times, whose
sex was unknown to any but herself.--4/mencan paper.
Advices from Tahiti, by way or San Francisco,
report further seizures of Peruvian vessels engaged
in steal-
ing South Sea islanders to sell them as slaves to work on the
Peruvian guano islands. The natives of Kuppa seized a
Peruvian vessel, confined the crew as prisorers, and by the
aid of a white man took the ship 300 miles, and delivered
her up with the crew to the French authorities at Tahiti.--
Californian .Paper.