A Gilded Shame, By "Owl." 2 vols. (Literary Publishing Com-
pany.)—" The bride blushed," we read on p. 32, "oven to the ex- tremity of her smoothly-chiselled profile," which is " Owl's " delicate way of saying "to the tip of her nose." This is elegance. Here is the terrible. It is from the description of a railway accident ;—"All that remained of the invention of man and the creation of God was a chaos of wheels and timber, cushioned seats and broken glass, and —worst of all, 0 angels of heaven shattered heap of human limbs and life-extinct humanity." We may notice, as a curious fact in which Oxford men will be specially interested, that when the story told in this novel was enacted the Cherwell was navigated. The Oxford man, indeed, may learn not a few things which will probably be novel to him, from the description of the manners and customs of his University. Otherwise it will scarcely repay study.
The fourth edition of the Landed Interest and the Supply of Food, by James Ceird, RMS. (Cassell, Potter, and Galpin), has been extensively revised, and appears with its information, statistics, &c., brought down to a recent period. It is interesting, and not a little surprising, to read, and this after the disastrous year 1879, that "the state of agriculture in Ireland, chiefly owing to the high price of live-stock and the increasing demand for store animals to be fattened in Great Britain, now appears to have attained a position of general progress and prosperity greater than has over been previously experienced in that portion of the United Kingdom." Much other interesting matter is to be found. It is pleasing to be told about the power of "taking a second crop of wheat," as a latent remorse force, which would go some way towards making us independent of foreign supplies. A suggestive comparison of the present with the past is oupplied by the fact that in 1770 a labourer had to work five days for a bushel of wheat, and that he could earn it in 1880 in two days and a half.
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