The Sun. — 1870-03-03 (London, England)

LITERATURE.  Old Stories Retold. By Walter Thornburg.  Chapman and Hall.  Mr. Thornbury has hardly done himself justice by his title. His work is, and it is not, a rechauff• In other words—it is that, and something more. The author of " Old Stories Retold" can tell a tale with any one. He has the genius of a raconteur. He is a skilled man of letters. He has scholarship. But, with that—for he is no mere Dryasdust--he has that gift of the gods, a vivid and vivifying imagination. When he describes a thing, you can see it. And in sketching a scene or an incident, he does so by no means in neutral tint, or in Indian ink, or in sepia. His pictures are glowing with all the colours of the paint-box. He is eminently realistic. The very one, therefore, to tell us all over again such enthralling narratives as those he has (from how many scattered directions !) brought at last together and into companionship. The Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Algiers. The 0. P. Riots and Emmet's Insurrection. The Bristol Riots, again, and the Loss of the Kent East Indianian. The Infernal Machine of Fieschi and the Forgeries of Fauntleroy. The wreck of the Medusa, and the Cato-street Conspiracy. Such were the raw materials of his book as it appeared first of all piecemeal in All the Year Round. Such are they now that the work is issued altogether in this attractive publication. But among the raw materials of the book there are enough and to spare of raw-headland-bloody-bones materials—there are full, true, and particular accounts, for example, Of such horrible murders as those of Burke and Hare, the Resurrection Men ; as those of Sarah Malcolm—as that of Thurtell, and as those terrible massacres perpetrated in .1823 by Williams in the Ratcliff Highway. It is curiously noticeable in regard to the sketch here given of the appalling history of the Poisoner, Thomas Griffith Wainewright, that Mr. Thornbury appears strangely enough to be in no way aware of the masterly delineation of that exceptional ruffian in the character of Gabriel Varney, in Lord Lytton's romance of crime, yclepped " Lucretia." Be" ginning, as the retrospect of sritne given in this book does, with the record of the Life of 3 Methodist Preacher in 1715, ono wonders that the compiler of the work never dreamt of including among his themes the tragical incident recounted in the later half of the last century, by the Rev. Sir Herbert Croft, in a small pocket volume, called " Love and Madness." The principle of selection adopted by Mr. Thornbury is beyond our conjecture. Accepting the book, however, precisely as it is, it is to the last degree enthralling. It exercises on its readers a sort of glamour of fascination• &gin one of these Old Stories, no matter which, and you must perforce read it on until the end. Open the book anywhere and you are instanter held by the glittering eye of the tale teller, who has-for the truthful telling of these tales—gone through an amount of laborious investigation that he will have small credit for, or we are very much raiS" taken, even from the most keenly appreciative.  COMIC) PAPERS, (Hont Punch.)  A LAw Sun.—Wig, Gown, and Bands.