CURRENT LITERATURE.
Elisabeth, Empress of Austria : a Memoir. By A. de Burgh. With 80 Illustrations. (Hutchinson and Co. 6s.)—It goes without saying that a popular Life of the Empress of Austria published a few months after her death can only be a book- making compilation of newspaper intelligence, hearsay anec- dote, and irresponsible private communications. But the signal beauty and personal charm of the Empress Elizabeth combine with her romantic temperament and tragic fate to make her a personage of quite extraordinary interest, and there are plenty of readers eager to devour any memoir of her. Of the present one we are constrained to say that it has very little literary merit. It is cast too much in the style and tone of the fashionable chroniclers of Court intelligence. None the less, we have perused it with interest, and it is worth asking for at Mudie's, if only for the sake of its capital collection of portraits. Some of the pictures of the Empress are quite delightful, most notably that on p. 51, which shows her as she appeared at her son's wedding. Among the most entertaining episodes of the volume is the story of the Princess's betrothal, which reads like an old fairy-tale. The account of the Emperor's coronation and consecra- tion as Ring of Hungary, taken from the Illustrated London News of June, 1867, is full of picturesque details of curious historical interest. Though the Empress was not studious in girlhood, she had cultivated tastes, and was a great reader in many literatures. Her favourite English authors were Shake- speare, Byron, Longfellow, George Eliot, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. She liked also the novels of Marie Corelli, and was deeply interested in Corleone. Several of Shakespeare's plays she translated into modern Greek. Very full accounts of her hunting experiences in England and Ireland fill a good many pages of the book, and considerable space is taken up with the details of her assassination and the funeral rites.
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