"LAUGHING ELF."
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—Is it too late to remedy an injustice unintentionally done to Mr. Ronald Macdonald's Laughing Elf in your Literary Supplement of December 2nd ? I refer not to your reviewer's criticism, however much I may differ from him, but to the fact that the book is classed and treated as a " children's book." I had read the book twice—it is not easy to get at its full meaning even with the help of its Latin motto, risus harmania discordantium—but it had not once occurred to inc that it was to be taken as a child's book : and, on my referring to the author, he assures me it was never so intended The book seems to me clearly to belong to the same class as his father, George Macdonald's, Phantastes : a Faerie Romance • for Men and Women, and perhaps it would have been well if he had described it in some such terms on the title-page.—
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