20 NOVEMBER 1897, Page 11

Leighton revives once more the don-hunting days of Queen Elizabeth

and Sir Francis Drake, and, in fact, reproduces the great fight off Flores in which Sir Richard Grenville did his best with his ' Revenge' against the overwhelming odds of the Spaniards. A family feud is also very adroitly introduced into the story by means of the ill-feeling which exists between Gilbert Oglander, or Lord Champernoun, who tells the story, and his traitorous cousin Philip. At least a half of the book is given up to the attempts of Philip to trip up his cousin—literally as well as otherwise—but as he does this on sea as well as on land there is ample room for adventure of every kind. Of this, indeed, there is abundance, and then, of course, there is the golden galleon to be found, and found it is in the long-run, although in perhaps rather too sudden a fashion. Philip and Gilbert Oglander are well drawn, although they do remind us a little too readily of the cousins in " Westward Ho ! " and so is Timothy Trollopo, Gilbert's Sancho Panza, and a poor barber's son.

Miss Beatrice Harraden has issued a new edition of her delight- ful New Book of the Fairies (Griffith, Farrar', and Co.), with a preface in which she says that " new fairy friends have sprung up from unexpected quarters during these last few years ; some of them having presented themselves to me in their own informal fashion, and others having come to me with letters of introduc- tion from most unlikely people—one of the most unlikely being an old German professor, a very grave scholar, who, so you might have thought, would have known nothing about fairies." Some time Miss Harraden may write another fairy-book. Meanwhile she is content to introduce us a second time to the head-fairies and the human-fairies, and all our other old and excellent friends.