HENRY- BROCKEN.* THERE are few departments of fiction of more

venerable antiquity, or cultivated from a greater diversity of motives, than that of imaginary travels. Perhips the most resounding suc- cess6s have been achieved by writers such as Aristophanes,

• Henry Bracken: his Travels and Adventures in-the Rich, Strange, Scares /iziaginable Regions of Romance. By Walter J. de la Mare _(" Walter Rama! ") London John Murray. [66.] millennium, of which Utopia is the historic exemplar ; or those written for entertainment, with Robinson Crusoe at their

head,. subdivided again into a number of sub-species,—the biarleape. (Baron Munchausen), the quasi-scientific (Jules

Verne and Mr. H. G. Wells), and so forth. There also remain the-exploits of Psalmanazar and de Rougemont. It has been

reserved for Mr. de la Mare, if not to create, at any rate to develop with remarkable 'skill and picturesqueness,' a form of

Tiesveller's Tale which should appeal to an age thirsting for a frealilitera.ry sensation, and bewailing the absence of any new thing under the sun, with all the charm of en original dis- covery. Dialogues with dead authors and.imaginary.conversa-

tiens between famous characters in fiction we know, but the conception of a modern pilgrim faring forth on horseback in theEngland of to-day, and straying suddenly into an enchanted

kingdom. in which he meets and converses with in succession --esr•ii in an approgriate landscape and surroundings—the

heroes and heroines of romance, from Chaucer's Criseyde to Jana Eyre; from Bottom the Weaver to Annabel Lee; from

Herrick'S Julia to Lucy Gray,—this, so far as we know, has never. found detailed literary expression before, and it is a matter for congratulation that in Mr. de la Mare we have a pioneer not only well equipped for his hazardous journey, but fiallyconscious of the perils by which he is beset. , Criticism is largely disarmed by the whimsical, apologetic tone of his pre- face.., Most travellers that he ever heard of "were the happy possessor& of audacity and rigour, a zeal for facts, a zeal for science, evivid faith in powder and gold. Who, then, will bear for a moment with an ignorant pacific adventurer, without even_ a gun ? " But he • is fully alive to his audacity " in describing regions where the wise and the imaginative and the immortal have been before him," and for that " he never can he Contrite enough." His excuse must be that " it is his, and only his journey and experiences, his wonder and delight in theselands that he tells of."

Li a fantasy of this sort much depends on the start, and Mr. de Iii Mare is decidedly happy in diffusing a suggestive atmosphere in the pages which describe the lonely childhood of..the Traveller, and the long mental process which pre- cedes' his. pilgrimage :—

" Even while little else than a child I had begun to cast my mtrotto travel. I doubt if ever Columbus suffered such vexation from an itch to be gone. But whither ? Now, it seemed clear to me .after long brooding and musing that however beautiful were these regions of which I never wearied to read, and however ;vim and faithful and strange and lovely the people of the books, somewhere the former must remain yet, somewhere, in immor- tality serene, dwell they whom so many had spent life in dreaming of,. awl:writing about. In fact, take it for all in all, what coula these_authors have been at, if they laboured from dawn to mid- night,-from laborious midnight to 'dawn, merely to tell of what never was, and never by any chance could be ? It was heaven- clear to ins, solitary and a dreamer ; let -me but gain the key, I would. soon unlock that Eden garden-door. Somewhere, yet, I was. sure, Imogen's mountains lift their chill summits into heaven; over haunted sea-sands Ariel .flits ; at his webbed case- ment next-the stars Faust covets youth, till the last trump shall ring him out of dream."

Forthe sequel it is perhaps best to let the author speak for himself.. Here, for example, is a "nocturne " at Jane Eyre's : "The music ceased, the accompaniment died away ; but Mr. ROchester stood immobile yet—a little darker night in that much deeper. When I turned, Jane was gone from the room. I sat down, my face towards the still candles, as one who is awake, yet dreamsc on. The faint scent of the earth through the open window ; the heavy, sombre furniture; the daintiness and the alertness inthe many flowers and few womanly gewgaws : these teershall remember in a tranquillity that cannot change. A sudden; trembling glimmer at the window lit the garden and, instantaneously, the distant hills ; lit also the figures of Jane and. Mr-Rochester beneath the trees. They entered the house, and once more Jane drew the bolts against that phantom fear. A tinge of -scarlet stood in her cheeks; an added lustre in her eyes. They were strange lovers, these two—like frost upon a cypress tree e yet summer lay all around us. I bade them good night and ascended to the little room prepared for me. There was a great pincushion on the sprigged and portly toilet table, and I laboured till the constellations had changed beyond my window, imprinting from a box of tiny pins upon that lavendered mound, 'Ave, Ave, atquo Vale 1' Far in the night a dreadful sound woke rue.. I rose and looked out of the window, and heard again, deep antlreverberating„ Pilot baying I know not what light =lions of the issoen. The Great Bear wheeled faintly clear in the dark

From Jane Eyre's home Mr. Brocken journeys by the Garden of the Hesperides to Elfland, surprising Titania and Bottom in their woodland retreat :—

" There he lolled, immortal Bottom, propped on a bed of asphodel and =sly that seemed to curd the moonshine ; and at his side, Titania slim and scarlet, and shimmering like a bride. cake. The sky was dark above the tapering trees, but here in the Secret woods light seemed to cling in flake and scarf. And it so chanced as our two noses leaned forward into his retreat that Bottom's head lolled back upon its pillow, and his bright, simple eyes stared deep into our own. Save me, ye shapes of nought,' he bellowed, no more, no more, for love's sake. I begin to see what men call red Beelzebub, and that's an end to all true fellowship. Whiffle your tufted bee's wing, Signior Cobweb, I beseech you—a little fiery devil with four eyes floats in my brah,, and flame's a frisky bedfellow. Avaunt ! avannt ye! Would now my true friend Bottom the weaver were at my side. His was a courage to make princes great. Prithee, Queen Tittany, no more such cozening possets!' I drew Rosinante back into the leaves. Droop now thy honeyed lids, my dearest love!' I heard a clear voice answer. 'There's nought can harm thee in these silvered woods : no bird that pipes but love incites his throat, and never a dewdrop wells but whispers peace !'" Thence, after a sojourn at the enchanted Palace of the Sleeping Beauty, and a perilous immersion in the waters haunted by the Lorelei, Mr. Brocken emerges into the company of Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms. The recital of the Traveller's experiences in Gulliver's lodge, with all its " unsavouriness, solitude, neighing and tumult and prancing," and his escape from the beasts who haunted his journey, carries us into the region of mid-nightmare, though it is right to add that Mr. de la Mare in the most fantastic flights of imagination never commits the error, so frequent in some modern amateurs of the bizarre, of confounding the sinister with the repulsive. But perhaps the most striking tour de force in this curious volume is the conversation with the evil characters of Pilgrim's Progress concerning their acquaintance Christian, " who was either dead or had in- explicably disappeared."

Enough has perhaps been said and quoted to enable the reader to test the quality of Mr. de lit Mare's work, and to decide how far his daring experiment has been justified by results. Certain criticisms are obvious ; as that in inventing dialogue for characters created by his great predecessors he has not always been careful to modify the peculiarities of his own strongly marked style, in which a preference for recondite and fantastic words is a notable feature. In him the artist at times comes dangerously near the juggler. But if his talent for mimicry is occasionally to seek, the spirit of the im- personation is in the main delicately sympathetic; he excels in conjuring up scenes, by turns radiant and sombre, but always excellently harmonising with the personages introduced and the episodes in which they take part ; in fine, he must be congratulated on having made an engaging and original, addition to the literature of pure romance in a day when the majority of our younger writers are drowned in actuality, disastrously obsessed by the tyranny of the thing seen.