CURRENT LITERAT URE.
The Education of Mr. Pipp. By Charles Dana Gibson. (John Lane. 20s.)—Mr. Gibson has created a real personage in his delightful character, Mr. Pipp. We see him before us in his physical characteristics, and through this picture of the outer man we are given a real insight into his mind. Mr. Pipp is
emphatically what women call a " darling." He is small, he is shabby-looking, his hair and his whiskers are ridiculous, and his• best friends could not call him handsome. Yet we see that he• had a merry mind, that he was in the truest sense of the word a gentleman, and we love him for his unselfishness, his devotion to his magnificent daughters, and even for the pathos of his bewilderment when he finds himself in difficult and incomprehen- sible situations. Now, to express all this through the medium of black-and-white drawings is no mean tour de force, for we feel that we should have understood the whole story quite as well if the "reading" had been entirely left out. Mr. Gibson in these drawings, therefore, passes out of the ranks of the delineator into those of the creator, and the shade of Leech's Mr. Briggs will welcome Mr. Pipp as a fit companion in the shadow-land of the might-have-been. As for Mr. Pipp's daughters, we may be per- mitted the criticism that they really are too divinely tall and more divinely fair than is consistent with probability. We are glad to see in the last picture that Mr. Pipp's delightful grand- son has inherited the merry mind of his grandpapa. Perhaps in future years Mr. Gibson will trace for us the career of this engaging young gentleman with as true an insight and as certain a pencil as he has used in the present book.
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