' Captain. Mayne Reid : his Life and divestures. •By
Elizabeth Reid, his Widow. Assisted by Charles H. Cole. (Greening and Co. 8s. 6d.)—This biography is somewhat belated, for the sub- ject of it died seventeen years ago. Still, it would have been a. pity if EO varied and interesting a career had missed a record. Mayne Reid was of Scotch-Irish descent, coming from a line of Presbyterian ministers in County Down. At twenty-one he emigrated to New Orleans, where he had various occupations, the charge of groups of slaves among them. He was successively clerk in a store, a private tutor, a wandering actor, a litterateur. A commission as Lieutenant of a regiment of Volunteers in the Mexican War was more to his taste ; to his military duties he added those of a war correspondent, a class of which he was a very early specimen. In 1849 he had to choose between gold- hunting in California and helping the European revolutionists, and he preferred the latter. But he was too late. Before he could join the Hungarian Army it had ceased to exist. Then he fell back on literature. He was successful from the beginning. His" Scalp Hunters," published in 1851, has a world-wide fame. A million copies have been sold, and it "has been translated into as many languages as the Pilgrim's Progress." Mayne Reid might have realised a handsome fortune by his pen, had it not been for an unconquerable passion for new ventures in building farming, dm. The prices he received are such as to make the average writer of fiction envious. He wrote twenty-three novels, for each of which he received an average of £1,000, and twenty- four "books for juveniles," for which he had an average of £550. This gives a total of £37,000, not bad pay for a literary life which lasted about thirty-three years.
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