In the Wrong Paradise. By Andrew Lang. (C. Kogan Paul
and Co.)—The title-story is the best in the book, suggested, the writer informs us, by D'Assier's "Sur I'llumanitd Pos- thume," and relates the experiences of a missionary who finds himself in Heaven as imagined by the Ojibbeways, a Pentonville a3sthete in paradise as painted by the ancient Greeks, and a college don in that of the Ilahommedans. The idea evidently gives scope for some good situations, and some there are ; but it is only a very ghostly laugh, the mere phantom of earthly laughter, that is really evoked by the laboured fun of the story. The only good thing in the whole book is perhaps the guide's remark when the hero pleads agnosticism for not going to any paradise,—" As for your agnostics, their main occupa- tion in the next world is to read the poetry of George Eliot and the philosophical works of Mr. J. S. Mill," on which he prepared, "with cheerful alacrity," to enter the paradise of the Ojibbeways. "The Romance of the First Radical," a really admirable reconstruction of the awful life of misery, Toryism, and superstition led by the man of the Swiss Lake Dwellings and the Stone Age, though inatructive, is amusing neither in itself nor even relatively to the author's more serious essay on similar subjects, "Custom and Myth," and his articles in answer to Professor Max Muller.
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