James Hain Friswell : a Memoir. By his Daughter. (George
Redway. 15s.)—The author of " The Gentle Life " was not a great thinker, a great novelist, or a great critic. But he was most industrious ; his life—he was born in 1825 and died in 1878 —was essentially a long struggle against disease borne with the utmost cheerfulness ; and he came in contact with many men, such as Tennyson, Thackeray, and Dickens, who were well known in the world of letters. He deserved, therefore, the erection of a cairn, in the shape of a biography, to his memory ; and his daughter, Mrs. Ambrose Myall, has shown good taste as well as affection in erecting it. But the book is twice as large as it need have been. Hain Friswell led a very uneventful life. After some unpleasant experiences in boyhood, from his father being, as Mrs. Myall says, a selfish, capricious man, he started on a career in literature which brought him to the useful post of leader- writer for the Family Herald. There were the usual ups and downs, but Friswell seems to have been able always to command a com- fortable, if not very large, income. But such a career was not marked by any very startling incidents, and Friswell was not on terms of close intimacy with the most distinguished of his contem- poraries. Mrs. Myall might have spared her readers most of the criticisms which were passed on her father's books at the time they were published, the details of the unhappy suit brought against him and his publishers by the late Mr. Sala, and such letters to correspondents as :—" Don't get tired ; you're too young. But be jolly and merry ; the good time is coming, I can assure you. To the true, God is true. Patience and faith." Among Friswell's best friends were Canon Kingsley, who wished him to take Orders, and Mrs. Norton, whom he lived long enough to congratulate on her marriage to Sir William Stirling Maxwell. Some of the best things in a book which might even yet be judiciously compressed are Mrs. Myall's own girlish impressions of Tennyson, Dickens, and Sir Walter Besant's ealaborateur James Rice.
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