The Sun.
London, England, 1856-10-14 00:00:00

LITERARY GOSSIP.

OCTOBE.R, 1856.
An illustrated edition of the collected poems of
Alfred Tennyson is understood to be in prepara-
tion. What exquisite themes for embellishment !
Scarcely a stanza of In Memoriam itself but has
ins picture already visible enough to the mind's eye
—ln Memoriam the most didactically abstracted
and purely contemplative of the Poet Laureate's
compositions ! His earlier, more sensuous, and,
so to speak, more easily realisable effusions abound
consequently with subjects yet more suggestive of
the forms of beauty to the fancy of an artist-of-
the-pencil. " Lady Gndiva," flitting from pillar
to pillar—" Marianna" lamenting in the lonely
moated Grange—the weird phautasies of the "Lady
of Shallott"—the green shaws about that grand
old " Talking Oak," Knee deep in the ferns of
Sumner-place—the " Lady of Burleigh" finding a
lord of high degree in the poor landscape painter
Lilian"—" Eleauere"—"Margaret"—" Lady
Clara Vere de Vere"—the "Vision of Fair Women"
—the " Gardecer'sDaughter"—the"Miller'sDaugh-
ter :" what hints these for the crayon of a Cor-
bould, or the brush of a Millais, or the deftest needle
in the ablest hand of any to be found among the
more gifted members of the rare old Etching Club!
Let us hope that the artists chosen to the enviable
privilege of interpreting the dainty imaginings of
the Laureate are not the selections from any one
narrow coterie. They ought to include among
them men of talents the most various and con-
trasting—so that we might light here, for example,
upon some little elf-like sketch from the hand of
Richard Doyle—here upon some sylvan glimpse of
tangled greenery from that of Birket Foster—here
upon some delicious dash of the modern comic
from the hand of John Leech, say in illustration of
Will Waterproof's ever-famous Monologue. And
so on—Fancy--
44 Pouring from her pictured urn "
together with—
., Thoughts that breathe and words that burn"—

peeps of fair forms and lovely landscapes, such as
may most happily accord with those brilliantly
shadowed forth in the magical camera of the verse
of Tennyson.
A two-shilling reprint of " Th'e Comic Black-
stone" has already followed hard upon the un-
timely fate of poor Gilbert Abbott A'Beckett.
May we not hope to have a cheap collective repub-
lication of the best of the humorous writings of
that wise wag—selected from all sorts of strange
and scattered sources of fun and frolic—beginning
with Figaro and ending with Punch—giving us
the tid-bits of drollery squandered upon the face-
tious periodicals of the day by the most incor-
rigible and inexhaustible of Punsters ? The sug-
gestion is worthy the attention of Mr. A'Beckett's
publishers, the Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, and
of whoever may be the literary executors of the
Comic Historian of Rome and England.
The most remarkable and attractive of recent
book announcements is beyond all doubt the one
" leading off " the Messrs. Longman's catalogue of
Forthcoming Publications—" A Year of Revolu-
tion. From a Journal kept in Paris in the year
1848. Three vols., Bvo. By the Marquess of Nor-
manby." What glimpses we may have through it
into the very heart of that grand political chaos—
what peeps behind the scenes, scenes trodden in
the midst of flame and uproar by actors of such
note as Guizot, and Thiers, and Arago, and La-
Diartine Before the "Purple Tints of Paris" had
deepened from the crimson of the bloodshed of
civil war in the streets into the perfected violet of
the second empire—before the vast and compli-
cated medley of incongruities became appropriately
crowned at length by that strange and, so to speak,
amphibious product of the Democratic Outburst of
1848, the complex and ontradictory designation of
the Chief of the State, " Monseigneur, his Imperial
Highness the Prince President of the French Re-
public"—a title abbreviated not two years after-
wards into that of His Imperial Majesty the
Emperor Napoleon 111. It is impossible not to
feel one's curiosity awakened by the promise of
this journal kept at Paris during the Revolution
of 1848, by her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador.
A livelier set of three volumes, wa anticipate, than
the yea-nay " Yes and No," given to the world
some years since by the same noble lord when Earl
of Mulgrave.
The book-making novel writers of the day are
hardly less industrious than hitherto, in the midst
even of the paper cataract of red, yellow, green,
purple, and parti-coloured cheap reprints littering
the railway-stalls with so much rubbish as well as
with so many literary masterpieces. Mrs. Trollope
has her three bran new volumes—and Mrs. Gore
the same—and Mr. G. P. R. James with his

steam arm walking the old mechanical pen
over the same well-accustomed amount. of letter-
press. While Mr. Ainsworth, in a more econo-
mical spirit, dribbles out chapter by chapter of his

niggardly 4" Spendthrift " through the pages of that
same Bentley's Miscellany, to which some eighteen
years ago he contributed, in a somewhat more ani-
mated and picturesque spirit, the record of the ad-
venturous rogueries of that arrant young scape-
grace "Jack Sheppard," victim of Jonathan Wild,
and friend of Blueskin.
As to the cheap reprints already cursorily
alluded to, they still hold possession of the book
market, in a great measure to the depreciation of
all costlier and more pretentious publications.
Dickens, Bulwer, Warren, Thackoray, Disraeli,
Ainsworth, James, Cooper, Jerrold, Irving—
among the recent and present chiefs of light litera-
ture, have set an example that has already proved,
and is now every day provirg more and more, con-
tagious. Insomuch that the cheap publishers are
hefi,rking back" among the story-tellers of the im-
mediately preceding generation—so that we arenow
getting volume by volume, for a shilling or so each,
the popular tales of Captain Marryat, and
Theodore Hook, and Sir Walter Scott, and Maria
Edgeworth. Could not Messrs. Routledge and
Company, or Messrs. Sampson Low and Company,
or Messrs. Ward and Lock, take one step still fur-
ther—giving us in the same way for a shilling or
so the elder masterpieces of such writers as Field-
ing, and Smollett, and Defoe, and Richardson—
not forgetting incidental works of mark like Char-
lotte Smith's "Old Manor House," and Maturin's
"Melmoth the Wanderer." Reproducing in shilling
volumes, instead of the miserable balderdash of
the vulgar comic-writers-to-order, the hack pun-
sters of some perished Puck or Dioyenes, classic
works in their way as inimitable as Fanny Bar-
ney'. " Evelina," or as Oliver Goldsmith's "V icar
of Wakefield." Reprints of some such sterling
value intrinsically, would be a wholesome tonic to
the purchasers and readers of our current light
literature.