A pleasanter holiday book than An Irish Peer on the
Con- tinent, 1801 to 1803 (Williams and Norgate, 10s. 6d. net), can scarcely be imagined. This account of a grand tour en famille- here were my lord and my lady and five children who ranged up from an infant in a wicker cradle—is given by one Miss Catherine Wilmot. She was not only a young woman of pedigree, as the editor is almost too careful to assure us, but she was a most lively, humorous writer. It is almost impossible to the reader who has any knowledge of the places she visited to put down the book till it is done. Miss Wilmot saw all the flee company and all the fine sights through exactly the right personal mediums. She is sardonic, painstaking, admiring or flippant just where she should be. She says of a certain Polish Countess : " She has arrived at that unbounded extent of aristocracy which always produces the utmost republicanism of manners." At Nimes she was disgusted by the sort of squatters' village which had been allowed to collect inside the circle of the vast Roman amphitheatre :— " I had gone up with the remembrance of past grandeur and had imagined twenty thousand Roman nobles occupying their seats. But when I looked down . . . upon the obtrusion of squalid wretchedness obliterating all vestiges of the past . . . the illusion vanished and all my fine Roman amphi- theatre appeared transformed into the scoop'd rind of an old cheese, the haunt of maggots and all abomination. . . . The Prefect received us in great state. He was dressed in the blue and silver embroidery of his office, had the air of a place man and as much Brocade in his countenance as there was on his boots and coat."
Which is as much of a scene from "The Government Inspector" as could well be compressed into that number of words. We regret that space does not admit the culling of further flowers from the pages of as unpretentious and as amusing a book as has appeared for long enough.
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