The Sun.
London, England, 1856-11-29 00:00:00

LITERARY GOSSIP,
NOVEMBER, 1856.

'Christmas Books appear to be at a discount. Not
the glimmering hope of one from any masterhand
Yet time was, and not so very long ago either,
when the approach of December gave promise of a
shower of parti-coloured five shilling volumes of rarer
attraction, as surely as of " cakes and ale," of holly
and of misletoe. No premonitory advertisement'
cheers us now with a prospect of a fairy burlesque
about Prince Bulbo and the Magic Ring, by W. M.
Thackeray, or of another marvellous Carol in Prose
by our incomparable Dickens. Meanwhile, hovi-
ever, we are consoled, on one hand, by a long che-
rished hope that London may yet, in due course, be
entertained by a repetition of the Four Lectures on
the Four Georges by Michelangelo—of the " bar-
nacles," not of the brush and chisel—Titmarsh, Not
Buonarotti ! And on the other, in addition to the
monthly instalments of " Little Dorrit," have
a delightful foretaste, through advertise-
ment, of a fresh batch of winter night's
Itanle;n but regard, this season, not to the Holly Tree
to
orlhe Boat's crew of the Golden
i)s
hi
Mary, cast away on the high seas, and
wonderfully preserved from shipwreck ! Hugging
our knees, like poor old Maggy, we lean forward—
open eyed, open eared, with a rub of the hands and
a smack of the lips, eager to'catch the first syllable--
our appetite whetted by the relish of anticipation !
In lieu of his old drolleries of the "Comic
Almanack," there comes to us from the hand of
George Cruikshank, a shrewd acid little pamphlet,
in which he reveals, oddly enough, through the
quaint woodcut of the title page—how it comes to
pass that the " Bubble" Company (The General
Industry Life and Fire Assurance and Sick
Fund Friendly Society) blown out of a few dirty
soap suds by one J. W. Howell, came to be
—Burst ! It is a characteristic warning enough
from the hand of one of our great living moralists
—(for Hogarth with his master-brush was after all
not one jot more of a moralist, in his way, than
Cruikshank has been, in his, with his master-pencil)
—wholesome and welcome beyond all words of
ours can express in this age of Bubble Blowing,
Swindling, Roguery, and Embezzlement.
Scarcely has Mrs. Browning emerged once more
from her Florentine retreat with a grand, new,
golden, glorious ,poem in nine books—" Aurora
Leigh" (about which we shall have to say more
anon, elsewhere)—when Mr. Procter charms us
anew into attention by the announcement of cer-
tain forthcoming " Dramatic Scenes" never before
published. Pleasant tidings for all those who
appreciate—and who does not ?—the Poetic and, in
many respects, the essentially dramatic genius of
Barry Cornwall.
Another and a not less popular, though a much
younger poet—the poet of a later generation—Dr.
Charles Mackay, pipes a sylvan prelude to his new
book of songs by the mere utterance of its sweet,
suggestive title—" Under Green Leaves." It is -
the promise, that title, as of the warbling of a
nigh tisgale.
Another poetic Charles, the Rev. Charles
Kingsley, one of the most prolific and remarkable
writers of the age, 'wakens our expectation by
intimating that there is now in active preparation
in the press a new volume of verses from his pen of
glamour, classically entitled " Andromeda."
Sir illiam Napier's introductory volumes (vols.
I. and II.) of the History of his heroic brother Sir
Charles Napier—the Great Sir Charles Napier, the
Sir Charles Napier—the Conqueror of Scinde, the
Administrator of Scinde, the Hero of Meanee—are
looked forward to, just now, with the most eager cu-
riosity. Nobody doubts but that such a writer
upon such a subject, must perforce result in render-
ing the groundwork in its way a masterpiece of
military biography. Less than this could hardly
be expected now, in the fullness of his rare intel-
lectual powers, in the ripened vigour of his virile
and rhetorical style, from the immortal historian
of the great war in the Peninsula ! It is as if
Tacitus were to have undertaken the biography of
Hannibal. Only that then the annalist would
have lacked what is not lacking here, the inspirit-
ing incentive of the most ardent fraternal appre-
ciation. _ _ _

A young adventurer simultaneously in the fields
of art and letters—one certain of the kindliest wel-
come if only for his dear father's sake—Thomas
Hood the Younger ("Hood's Own"—Son)—is to
present to the English public this season his maiden
work as Author and Artist—a gift-book seasonably
published, and called alliteratively " Pen and Pen-
cil Pictures."
The collective republication of the winter-
season, beyond all others, facile princeps,
without any manner of doubt, is the one an-
nounced to appear in six shilling monthly vo-
lumes, by Messrs. Chapman and Hall—the Com-
plete Works, re-edited and revised, of Thomas Car-
lyle : great as the historian of the French Revolu-
tion, greater as the analyst of the genius of Goethe,
greatest of all as the biographer of Oliver Cromwell.
Conspicuous among the magazine announce-
ments, on the other hand, is that of a new sorial
story, to begin upon the let of January, in Frazer's
Magazine, a tale entitled " The Interpreter," and
written by Major Whyte Mellville, the young sol-
dier-novelist, who is to Regina what Col. Hamley
is to Maga, one of the most lively and original
among all her recent contributors.