Rambles in Book - Land. By W. Davenport Adams. (Elliot Stock.)—Mr. Adams
has followed up his "By-Ways in Book- Land" with another agreeable volume of literary gossip. We cannot wholly agree with his maxims on the treatment of books. "Make your notes on separate paper" is, to a reviewer at least, a counsel of perfection. For the most part, we find him sympathetic and sensible. In writing out the praises of beer, he would have done well to quote the most emphatic of them all, a song written by an English Bishop. One of the most interesting chapters is "A Philosophical Crusoe." Mr Adams has dug up a curious romance published in 1745 by John Kirkby. It is the story of a child who was left alone on a desert island in his infancy, and lived there for nineteen years. Automathes (that is the hero's name) describes how his conscience was first awakened by the thought of the injury that he might have done to animal life by setting fire to a coppice. There is a curious parallel here to a famous passage in Theodore Parker, where he describes how he heard the inner voice for the first time when he was about to throw a stone at a little tortoise basking in a pond.
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