CURRENT LITERAT ETRE.
GIFT-BOOKS.
More Beasts (for Worse Children). Verses by" H. B." Pictures by"B T. B." (Edward Arnold.)—Mr. Belloc and Lord Basil Blackwood—the secret is, we understand, an open ono—have discovered a new continent in the world of nonsense. Their second book which sings and illustrates this New World is to the full as original and delightful as the first. The animals are as sagacious, and the human beings as blandly self- satisfied and stupid, as in "The Bad Child's Book of Beasts," An inimitable expression of slyness dwells in the eye of the frozen mammoth, who knows that he will never make a pot-au-feu for the group of expectant travellers who have imported their French chef into the Arctic regions. The python, too, who still survives the aunt who purchased him in Yucatan, is depicted sleeping under an umbrella in the desert, smiling with the wisdom of all the ages on the guileless world around him. Is for the Cambrian sheep, it is as impossible as it was for Lord Thurlow that any one should be as wise as he looks. It might be thought an almost hopeless task to illustrate the world of nonsense, and yet not to imitate the immortal cartoons of Mr. Edward Lear, yet these pictures are really original. They are not like Lear, but no child will doubt for a moment that they are authentic sketches of Nonsense Land. And children are not to be deceived. Some artists have been to Nonsense Land, and some only imitate the pictures of the sountry. Lord Basil Blackwood has obviously been there him- self, and knows exactly that the sun always shines a perfect orange in shape over the deserts of the country, and that there are invariably two palm-trees silhouetted on the horizon. A gun, too, in authentic pictures always goes off in five dotted lines, so that you see what a bang it must have made. The only modern heresy which the artist has allowed to creep into his pictures is a slight tendency to the Japanese methods which are now so strongly affecting the whole art of illustration. But there is no reason why Nonsense Land should have a sudden influx of Japanese art, even if the dull every-day world has. Mr. Belloc's verses are worthy of the pictures. His descriptions are appropriately graphic. How felicitous, for instance, are the lines -which describe how the missionary in some far Coptic town finds in his breakfast egg —
Green, hungry, horrible, and plain, An infant crocodile."
And how full of philosophy is the sentiment in which he exhorts his child readers :—
"Oh ! let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about."
Perhaps in another edition Mr. Belloc will change the adjectives in which the Wanderoo rants. " Wild, unmeaning rhymes" is good, but not so good as the "wild, unmeaning bounds " in which the kangaroo jumped in the former book. The juxtaposition of the adjectives is too striking to be used with effect more than once in verse which is as widely quoted as that contained in the two " beast " books.
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