CURRENT LITERATURE.
GIFT BOOKS, Exc.
Jack and the Beanstalk. English Hexameters by Hallam Tennyson. Illustrated by Randolph Caldecott. (Macmillan and Co.)—Mr. Hallam Tennyson's hexameters are very good, and his whole recast of Jack the Giant-Killer is a charming one, though its readers will hardly be as apt to think that Jack was in serious danger, as the readers of the old nursery-tale were. There is, indeed, a laugh running through it. The Giantess, "with fat cheeks, peony-bulbous," is a comic figure, rather than the alarmed, pitiful giantess of our childhood. The story is graphically told, and with a humorous directness. Mr. Caldecotes illustrations, though never completed, are full of fan,—the best of all, perhaps, being those of the animals with which Jack stocks his farm. The pig is most fasci- nating, and the goats full of abandon.
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