The One Fair Woman. By Joaquin Miller. 3 vols. (Chapman
and Hall.)—This is a very strange book. It reminds us, in a way, of Hans Andersen's " Improvisatore." Its greatest charm, indeed, lies in the same quality which is characteristic of Andersen's work. Mr. Joaquin Miller has come to Italy as the Danish poet came, and has been simply carried away by the overpowering charm of its climate, its scenery, its life. Nothing could be more interesting and delightful, in this respect, than the One Fair Woman. But as a tale, to tell the truth, it is naught. "The Fair Woman" herself is a very colourless personage, whose beauty even we have almost to take for granted, and who has no other char- acteristics to speak of. Then there is another "fair woman," of whom we hear a great deal more than we do of the real one, but who is as unintel- ligible as the other is indistinct. In one scene, indeed, where the hero, in his chivalrous resolve to help the woman whom he does not care about, runs serious risks of offending the woman whom he loves, there is a glimpse of power which gives us the hope that the author may do something much better than this. As the book stands, it indicates a curious lack in the author of the sense of the fitness of things. It is simply astonishing to find four pages given to the old story of "Est, Est "—told, too, as we have never seen it told before of a Pope—and still more surprising to find another four pages given to an adaptation of the hackneyed scene in The Critic, where the characters go off repeating, with varied emphasis, theitititte line. Then, again, there is that annoying trick, caught from Charles Diekens, of endlessly repeating some little peculiarity of manner. , How often does Mrs. Wopsus, wife of a great railway magnate in the West, whose face is seamed with miniatures of her husband's railway-lines, "send a little express train of shining tears down one of her numerous railroad- lines, till it collides against a pleasant smile at the corner of her month-!" One thing we must say, that Mr. Joaquin Miller is not very happy in describing England. Witness what he says about the drive in Hyde Park. Did he ever see "the poor stand fifty deep" looking at the carriages? There is no place in London where you would see so few poor.
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