Stories after Nature. By Charles Wells. With a Preface by
W. J. Linton. (Lawrence and Bullen.)—Charles Wells, who died in 1879, was a friend of Kead, and his name lives in one of that poet's sonnets. At the age of twenty-four, he wrote his drama of Joseph and his Brethren, which, it may be remembered, was reprinted some years ago, and highly praised by Mr. Swinburne. The attempt to give it new life by means of a new edition can scarcely be called successful, and, in spite of considerable strength and poetic fervour, the poem has never obtained the recognition for which a poet craves. Stories after Nature, written when Wells was twenty-two, are not wholly without charm, but while marked by poetic feeling and a genefous purpose, they are too quaint and too unreal in the grotesque extravagance of the plots to leave a mark in literature. The style may be said to gravitate between sim- plicity and youthful affectation, and the merit of these fantastic stories are less prominent than their defects. Yet there is throughout a faint note of genius indicative of a budding poet, and of one who had listened to the grand utterances of the Eliza- bethans. The pretty volume, published with much taste by Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen, is limited to four hundred copies.
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