Contemporary Spain as Shown by her Novelists. A Compilation by
Mary Wright Plummer. With an Introduction by Edward E. Hale, D.D. (Truelove, Hanson, and Combes).—This is a very naive piece of bookmaking. Miss Plummer explains that having occasion to read a great many translations of Spanish novels with a view to producing an article on Spanish fiction, she was struck with the number of vivid pictures of life and scenery and manners that passed under her eyes ; and it occurred to her that a collection of these passages would make a good sort of companion to a traveller's guide-book. The. idea is not a bad one, and there is a great deal of delightful reading in the volume, which includes extracts from Alarcon, Bazan, Gald6s, Valdes, and Juan Valera. We only wish the compiler had put headings to her various pieces. It is annoying to pass from one topic to another, and from one writer to another, without any information as to the transition one is making. Certainly the information is given in footnotes and a table of contents, but these are out-of-. the-way sources, troublesome to look into. The general effect of the book is—in the words of the man who read Johnson's Dic- tionary straight through—" decidedly interesting, but rather unattached."
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