Kennaquhair : a Narrative of Utopian Travel. By Theophilus M'Crib.
(Chapman and Hall.)—Cervantes killed Don Quixote to save him from unworthy hands, and Addison is said to have shortened the life of Sir Roger de Coverley lest Sir Richard Steele should make the good knight as disreputable as himself. Let no author hereafter think thus to rescue his " brain-children " from ill-treatment. Death will not protect them from the audacious hands of a writer whose only merit is to have taken an appropriate pseudonym. The boldness—would it be libellous to say the impudence ?—of the conception of this book passes belief. The author imagines himself to be conducted by Sterne into a region peopled by the imaginary personages of literature. These person- ages he, as it were, attempts to revive, wholly unconscious, it would seem, that he thus compares himself with some of the greatest names in English literature. Imagine a man gravely sitting down to write what is practically a cantinuation of Sterne, Walter Scott, Dickens, Anthony Trollope ! Of course, when he gets beyond absolute quotation the effect is dreary beyond conception.
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