The Sun.
London, England, 1865-05-15 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Hunting Sketches. By Anthony Trollope. One Vol.,

pp. 115. Chapman and Hall.

The readiest writer of the day is surely Mr.
Anthony Trollope. No one living writes more dis-
tinctly, we should say currente calamo. Reading
him is, for all the world, like listening to the con-
versation—at times the small-talk, even at moments
the very small talk—of an exceedingly pleasant
companion. Glib as glib as can be are the periods
here run from the pen-point with all the idiomatic
fluency of a purely conversational style. With a
fluency so remarkable as to impart to the general
effect of the writing an air of absolute carelessness.
The present sketches, " Hunting Sketches" as they
are called—eight little harum-scarum papers in all
—indicate in a very vivid manner the peculiarities
of this almost slovenly mannerism of Mr.
Trollope's. They illustrate it in fact so
vividly as by their illustrations even to exaggerate
it. Insomuch is this the case from the outset that
the very first sentence is Ungrammatical ! "It
seems to be odd," says Mr. Trollope, " at first sight
that there should be any such men ; but their name
and number is legion"—the italics, of course, being
our own. Dashed off helter skelter for our gal-
lant young contemporary, the Pall Mall Gazette,
these Hunting Sketches depict to the life—The Man
who Hunts and Doesn't Like it—The Man who
Hunts and Does Like it—The Lady who rides to
hounds—The Hunting Farmer•—The Man who
hunts and never jumps The Hunting
Parson—the Master of Hounds—and How to Ride
to Hounds. He depicts them with a few seemingly
quite casual touches—and yet through those few
touches, jotted down by a true artist's hand, hits
them off to a nicety, as through the lens of a pho-
tographer. As Sketches they have some sort of a
resemblance—in their combination pretty equally
of vividness and carelessness—to several of
those wonderful pencil drawings of Hunting
Scenes, recently on view at Messrs. Christie and
Manson's—before being scattered to the four winds
by the dispersing hammers of those auctioneers.
Pencillings of men and horses and dogs, careering
over hedge and over ditch by the master hand of
that dear lamented friend of us all, John Leech.
What Leech had done there in those Hunting
Sketches with a pencil—Anthony Trollope has done
here in these with a pen. They are full of life,
humour, verisimilitude. A random touch, now
here, now there, upon the page, and
the hunting scene and the hunting people
are brought out vividly to view. It is next to impos-
sible to feel dull while turning over these Sketches
You look and smile, you read andlaugh. The morn-
ing air blows about you. The, dew-wet branches of
the copse, splash your face as you make your way
onwards among the leaves. You are in thepigskin
the stirrup-leather taut under the pressure of the
ball of your foot in the gaunty apricot-tops. The
sweat-stained skirts of your " pink" flutter across
the flanks of your hunter as you ride
well to hounds, " through brake, through briar,"
over fence, over rasper, cheek-by-jowl, almost at a
dead heat with the pleasant comrade, who leads you
onwards close after the pack so long as the scent
lasts, or until the varmint is driven to earth !
Pencillings by the way though these are—more
strictly than any of those jotted down by N. P.
Willis—they are well worthy of having been col-
lected together thus for preservation upon our
bookshelves. They are fragrant of country life, and
with all their carelessness—a carlessness on the part
of the writer, oddly over emulated by the printer,
instance at p. 28, " the run of the reason," mis-
printed for the " run of the season"—with all their
flagrant carelessness, these are manly, honest, and
true as Hunting Sketches.

Church and Queen : Five Speeches delivered by the
Right Hon. B. Disraeli, M.P., 1860-1864.
Pp. 79. G. J. Palmer, 32, Little Queen-street.

The speeches here collected together in this
little sixpenny pamphlet, edited by a member
of the University of Oxford, have certainly been
issued from the press most opportunely. Oppor-
tunely, that is, with the prospect of a general elec-
tion before August, and with the certainty of a
pretty sharp contest upon the 'very questions dis-
cussed in these remarkable speeches of Mr. Disraeli's
—one of them about the most remarkable speech
he has ever delivered—a pretty sharp contest
in a good many constituencies besides that
of the University of Oxford. The fifth speech
in this pamphlet, the last of the five speeches re-
ported in it, is of course the one we have but just
now alluded to—the one on Church policy de-
livered at Oxford on the 25th of last November
by the Right Hon. the leader of her Majesty's Oppo-
sition. By constituencies of both parties, or of neither,
by members of both sides of the House of Commons
as it now is, by aspirants to seats in its im-
mediate successor, alike Whigs and Tories, Libe-
rals and Conservatives, Radicals and Retrogrades,
that fifth speech, the whole of these five speeches
ought to be reperused, and that, moreover, very
attentively. The pamphlet is valuable, if for no
other consideration, for inasmuch as it is a most
timely and acceptable refresher !