A TIDE OF REMEMBRANCE.*
HERE are three books that take us back to three very different worlds. Sir Henry Robinson gives us the history of his
forty years' administrative work in Ireland.' We are glad that when the old Local Government Board, of which he was the last Vice-President, passed out of existence, he decided to write these memoirs, for they have made a most excellent book, as instructive as only such first-hand information can be, and as racy as a story by George Birmingham. Nothing could be better than the intimate glimpses we obtain through his pages of the fascinating succession of Viceroys, Chief Secretaries and Under-Secretaries, a gallery of very diverse portraits, from Lord Frederick Cavendish to Lord Wimborne, from John Morley to Sir Hamar Greenwood. And it almost goes without saying that the book is crammed to the full with good stories. Indeed, there are so many that quotation once embarked upon would never end. One chapter alone, that which relates the troubles of the various Chief Secretaries in trying to cope with the terrible hospitality (mostly running .to potcen) of the parish priests they visited, should be quoted in full if at all. The reader must gather in his own rich harvest. Mr. Mason: is a memorialist of another kind. He is your true adventurer, for, going to sea in the old sailing ships at a very early age, he has been restless ever since. He has been a sailor, ship's officer, farmhand, gold miner, and much else besides, and his straightforward chronicle of his experiences on land and sea from Ireland to Nevada, San Francisco to the Fiji Isles, makes the ordinary adventure story seem a very humdrum affair. Mr. Basil Tozer, as he confesses,' has also been a rolling stone, but his lot has fallen in more pleasant places ! Earning a living seems a desperate enterprise when we read Mr. Mason's reminiscences, and a very simple and amusing affair when we are in Mr. Tozer's compapy. The latter had the good fortune to run across an old schoolfellow, an eccentric person, who had come into an enormous fortune, and who paid Mr. Tozer a large salary to travel about with him, and help him to spend it. The two of them wandered up and down the world, and had various exciting and amusing adventures, after which Mr. Tozer settled down to journalism and the publicity business. As a writer of memoirs, he is chiefly noteworthy for the fact that he thinks the girls of to-day an improvement upon the girls of yesterday, an opinion we never remember having encountered before in any volume of reminiscences.
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