CURRENT LITERATURE.
Puppets at Large. By F. Anstey. (Bradbury, Agnew, and Co.) —These humorous dialogues and monologues reprinted from Punch contain some of the funniest things ever written by Mr. Anstey. But to say thus is to praise very highly, for Mr. Anstey has, without question, the true comic inspiration. He does not jest, as it were, by accident, but because he has the afflatus of wit. "Doing a Cathedral" is as excellent a piece of fooling as there is in our modern comic literature. The Spectacled Spinster, who when she hears from the Verger that the Early Christians used baptism by total immersion at once calls them Baptists, and sets them down as Dissenters in whom no respectable person can take any further interest, is inimitable. Almost as delightful is the stodgy sightseer who is perplexed by the thought that doing the cathedral takes so long, and who keeps thinking that he ought to have told the head waiter at the 'Mitre' "to keep back those chops." "Saturday Night in the Edgware Road" is a splendidly contrived piece of incoherent street-babble, and the dialogue with Bosch, "The Courier of the Hague," is full of humour. Certainly Mr. Anstey has the sympathy of comprehension in a most astonishing degree. Dickens had, of course, greater imagination, greater eloquence, and greater power of construction, but not Dickens himself had a greater power of getting the essential humour out of a commonplace person and a commonplace situation.
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