16 DECEMBER 1893, Page 23

Flowers in May, by Mrs. Sale Barker (Routledge and Sons),

is a book of verses intended for little renders, and seeming well suited to them, with illustrative pictures not quite as good as the letter- press.—From the same publishers we get, also from the pen of Mrs. Sale Barker, Toddles : a Happy Day in a Child's Life. Here the story is told in prose ; the drawings are good, just a little realistic perhaps. But the heroine seems to vary somewhat in age from chapter to cluipter.—For Very Little Folk comes Li-cm the same publishers ; while Poems and Songs for Young People is a selection, edited by Mrs. Sale Barker, which con- tains some notably good things,—as, for instance, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," Burns's "For that and a' that" and "The Cotter's Saturday Night" (extract), Byron's " Sennaoherib," and" The Shipwreck" from" Don Juan,"—a fine piece which, owing to the bad company it is found in, is not so well known as it deserves. For Very Little Folk is suited, as regards both letter- press and pictures, for the readers which its title indicates.