The Cornhill Magazine. January, 1872. (Smith, Elder, and Co.) — The Corn/ill
has no padding this month of much merit, the paper on Spain being the best, and that a little thin, as if it were written by a man who disliked and despised Spain too much to enter thoroughly into her special tone, but the readers of the magazine have a rich treat before them in the commencement of another " fairy " story by Miss Thackeray, "Riquet of the Tuft." Take this description of the old fairy godmother :- " Mrs. Dormer at ninety years of age seemed younger, brighter, more interested in her surroundings than she had ever been. She was a little deaf, but she had a wonderful trumpet, and her eyes sparkled brighter and brighter ; she wrote the same delicate, though trembling hand ; she was lame, but, if she chose, she could fly across the room in one instant with the help of her tortoiseshell cane, and her wheel-chair, upon which she would come rolling into the room like any old fairy in her chariot, only the dragons who pulled it along were human dragons, Miss Bewley, her companion, or Mrs. Lulwortb. Sometimes, instead of dragons, Cecilia's little children would come and try to push, frolicking all round about it, and cooing and chattering in their little white pinafores."
Previous page
