CURRENT LITERATURE.
GIFT-BOOKS.
Cassell's Saturday Journal. (Cassell and Co.)—We have three serials in this volume of the Saturday Journal by writers of such various styles as Mrs. Meade, Frank Barrett, and Fergus Hume, so that every reader will find one of the three to suit him or her. Probably, however, the jewel stories, the long list of tricks of the trade, and the rather inferior short stories will attract the greater number of readers. The interviews with well-known people are really very readable, though we wonder that these men submit to it. We imagine that such persons think it best to forestall the reporter in search of copy, and we cannot blame them. The Saturday Journal is a mine of information with regard to the shady side of life, and we regret that it should be so, though such a careful description of all sorts and conditions of dishonest people and their methods may serve a good purpose. The best things in the Journal are the comic sketches ; they are a trifle vulgar, but the line drawing and its vigour is astonishing, and there is an apparently inexhaustible fund of humour in the several artists. We miss a name associated with a set of three cuts representing one man watching another drinking a mug of beer ; the phases of Hope, Anxiety, and Despair, as the contents gradually disappeared, were admirably rendered. The Journal is certainly not as good as it was, but still furnishes an abundance of miscellaneous reading, and may, let us hope, sustain its reputation better another year.
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