1 DECEMBER 1900, Page 37

The Bystander. By J. Ashby-Sterry. (Sands and Co. Ga.)- Mr.

Ashby-Sterry has collected in this volume a number of humorous, or sub-humorous, papers. Such collections always suffer from the fact that what is written to be read piece by piece is read as a whole. The substance, too, of these essays is sonietimes a little thin, and the occasions sometimes strained. "Jonas Chuzzlewit " is the title of the first paper, and why ? Jonas took his cousins to sights that could be seen for nothing, and we have accordingly some twenty pages about such sights. The occasion is not good enough. An allusion is all that it could have borne. We do not care to criticise the other papers in detail; there is certainly nothing to offend in them, and there is something to amuse ; we wish that there had been more.