A BREMEN FAMILY.
A Bremen Family. By G. Meinertzhagen. (Longmans and Co. 7s. 6d. net.)—The annals of a Hanseatic household, leading generation after generation from the fifteenth century onwards substantially the same lives, methodically chronicled—for such an atmosphere must have been fragrant with the very spirit of order—in diaries and letters, suggest possibilities of a fascinating sequence of genre pictures, aglow with grave magnificence and wholesome endeavour, leisured money-making and God-fearing ease. For any such realization, however, we search Ms. Meinertzhagen's record almost in vain. Mainly compiled from two eighteenth-century journals, only one of which has the smallest illustrative merit, her story wanders through a wilder- ness of estimable commonplace ; and the system of incorporating her notes bodily in the text, while supplying at times a touch of greatly needed entertainment, tends on the whole merely to aggravate a sense of annoyance and disappointment which grows with every chapter. Pleasant as it would have been to commend an effort to break untried and interesting ground, it is difficult to find either in the matter or the manner of its result any sufficient reason for its publication.
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