. Mr. Lewis Melville has now been so long before
the public as a gossiping writer on the lighter social sides of eighteenth- century life that one is tolerably well able to predict, even without reading Maids of Honour (Hutchinson, 21s.), that we shall find here easy-going historical prattle and healthy disregard for small details of grammar and scholarship. Here are displayed in a light but readable mode the careers—happy and unhappy, but mostly the first—of the many ladies—handsome and homely, but largely homely, for the Hanoverian sovereigns had, like James II., a sort of gust for ugly women—who adorned the Georgian Court or ministered to the pleasures of its monarchs. And of course we meet the usual crop of annoying errata like Polybus for Polybius, and Ovid's Metamorphosis and careless slips of omission like those on pp. 166, 227, and 287. But a book of Mr. Melville's is just the thing for people who like to think they are reading history ; and so it is—of a kind, not very "profound perhaps, but then it is often pleasanter to skate over the surface than to plunge into the depths.
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