Romances of the Chivalric Ages—The Pilgrim Brothers. This is a
book that would have mightily pleased Don Quixote : it is conceived by one who might have never dwelt in these nether re- gions, but who was indebted for his information as to sublunary proceedings to some knight in armour whom a whirlwind of the twelfth century had carried off into the realms of space clad in his mail of plate and steel. It will be a treat to those hating the realities of the present day, to transfer themselves in imagination to the moonlight scene whose grand feature is the baronial castle, frowning over hill and plain and stream, with its warder tracing his solitary and well-worn path by the battlemented parapet ; and to live in imagination at an epoch when all men were brave and all women chaste—when. each neighbourhood had its gem in fe- male form, and a hundred valiant heroes ready to pledge life and honour on the test of her supremacy in purity and loveliness. These, and numerous other ideas of a similar kind, are all here realized—that is to say, as far as paper and print can realize ideas. It is true, the heroes only enter the lists on a field of paper; but wide, very wide, is the area of the spectators. The heralds are the keepers of the circulating libraries; and it is well known that they demand but a trifling fee of admission to even the most wondrous sights.
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