CURRENT LITERATURE.
Jackanapes. By Juliana Horatia Ewing. With Illustrations by Randolph Caldecott. (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 1884.) —Why this delightful little tale is dated 1884, when it had already appeared in October, 1883, we cannot conjecture, and think that the " Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge " should discountenance such fictitious dates, as it doubtless desires to discountenance fictions of all kinds. Mrs. Ewing has never surpassed, even if she has over reached, the movement, liveliness, pathos, and general charm of this vivid little sketch, which is admirably illustrated by Mr. Caldecott,- though we think that he ought to have given more faithfully the group assembled on the village green to see Jackanapes take his first ride on Rollo. Mr. Caldecott has left out the gipsy, for instance, and has turned the old General into a young man. But to go back to Mrs. Ewing. The dialogues between the old General and his little grandson are as good as it was possible to make them, and indeed the lively transitions from one sketch to the next in the dissolving views of Jackanapes's life are full both of nature and of art. If Mrs. Ewing had shortened her tale by the last twenty lines, which to our minds injure it by inculcating something too much of a positive moral or sentiment, the suppression of which in the course of the story is one of its chief merits, we should have called this tale simply perfect. Were the last twenty lines insisted on by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge ? If so, that Society does not fully understand its own business. There is many a feeling which exerts twice as much influence so long as it is only suggested, as it could ever exert if it were distinctly and emphatically expressed.
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