CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Vasty Deep. By Stuart Cumberland. (Sampson Low and Co.)—Parts of this story are evidently designed as burlesque exaggeration, and it is not always easy to know where the carica- ture is meant to end, and the picture of things as they are to begin. The tendency to caricature is carried to excess in some places, especially in the delineation of the credulity of the dupes. The great lady who goes in for spiritualism because, "anyhow, it is a new sensation," and whose whim is cured by disgust when her hand gets accidentally streaked with red at a séance, is a possible sort of individual enough, and one whom we do not com- plain of. But to represent sane nineteenth-century people as believing that a clock had been stowed away by a spirit in a man's coat-tail pocket, is an insult to the reader's understanding ; and so it is to ask him to suppose that the frauds of a clumsy rogue like Brown, cheating with such coarsely palpable apparatus, would have achieved as much success as they did. The book's satire is of a vigorous, rather than refined and artistic quality ; and the scene of the stolen clock evidences some capacity for broad comedy. The materials of the tale are hackneyed, and loosely put together ; and the old saying about "nothing new, and nothing true, and it don't matter," suggests itself as a some- what appropriate definition of the whole work. Considering how little there really is in it, however, it is much more readable than would be expected ; and as it is very quickly run through, fairly amusing, needs no thought, and is essentially light literature, it seems well adapted for publication in one-volume form, for railway bookstalls. Does Mr. Cumberland consider himself (like Carlyle's Sigismund) to be super gramtnaticam? And if not, why does he write such sentences as, "He won't think it strange of my having just one letter "?
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