The Stream of Pleasure : a Month on the Thames.
By Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. (T. Fisher ITuwin.)—Mr. and Mrs. Pennell are in fairly good humour, we are thankful to say, and have, in consequence, made a pleasant little book out of their month's excursion on the Thames. They started from Oxford, and contrived, by dawdling in a most agreeable fashion, to spend a while month in getting to Teddington. This would give some- thing less than four miles a day, a rate of progress which the authors declare, with justifiable pride, to "cut the record." The time was well spent, for it produced a narrative agreeable if slight, and some exceedingly pretty pictures. The photographic illustrations we do not much admire; but when Mr. Pennell's pencil or pen has been called into action, the result is all that could be desired. The Inn at Sandford, Abingdon Bridge, Streatley Hill, and Monkey Island may be specially mentioned. We do not understand what is meant when the angler is said to have lifted a great brown jug of beer with his right and " held fast to the line with the left." Should we read " rod" for " line" ? Presumably he was not fishing with a hand-line. Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, who started on August 1st, must have supplied the " lone nightingale," an attraction of the river-side country, from their imaginations. Surely it is a hard saying that Frederick Walker (it is presumably he that is intended) was the only man who ever really painted English landscape ! "Sir Horace Walpole" is a personage not known to history. Mr. and Mrs. Pennell have our heartiest approval in what they say of the exclusive gentleman who lives at Mapledurham. They wonder that he "has not hung up a curtain in front of the beautiful trees that line his river- bank."
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