Pretty Polly; a Farce in Fyttes. By G. Manville Fenn.
(Tinsley Brothers.)—A "farce in fyttes " may be a happy idea, though it does not seem so to as ; but when there are forty-one " fyttes," and these fill about eight hundred pages, and one does not get a laugh out of the whole, we cannot say much for the execution. Surely laughter is the raison d'être of a farce, but nothing that we have read of Pretty Polly (we will be quite honest, and own that we have not gone beyond two-fifths) produce even a smile. The book is supposed to give the ex- perience and observation of a parrot, belonging to a maiden lady of a certain age in a provincial town. Its substance, if it has any substance, is a love-affair between a young doctor and the daughter of an older practitioner. It is possible that if this had been put by itself, if the parrot had been wholly omitted, and with it all the dull descriptions of servants entertaining friends without leave, drunken bachelors' parties, and the like, a readable novelette might have been constructed.
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