STRA.TFORD-ON-AVON.*
THE custom of publishing at this time of the year quantities of volumes popularly known as Christmas gift-books, presses as hardly upon the patience of the reviewer as it does upon the ingenuity of the publisher. By the very circumstances of the case this literature, if we may call it such, must be elaborately commonplace, equally fit for the boarding-school, the drawing- room, anti the boudoir, and alas ! equally unfit for the library. The method by which many of these books, if not the majority, are produced, is curiously simple to any one who is at all behind the scenes. A subject in some way connected with poetry or art is taken, a series of illustrations (generally collected from various sources) is obtained, a- literary hack-man either of the scholastic or the flippant order is commissioned to write- up to the illustrations ; the whole is printed on expensive paper, hound with a taste and ingenuity to which the in- side of the volume affords no parallel, and launched upon the world in the early days of November, to be ready for the Christmas season. It is a great problem what is the eventual destination of these works, and how it is that they ever pay for the cost of production, we can scarcely understand ; but still every Christmas sees a new crop, as surely as it sees the berries of the holly. The volume before us is .a very fair specimen of this class. It professes to be a history of Stratford-on-Avon from the earliest times to the death of William Shakespeare, and is, in reality, a miscellaneous chronicle of the various historical and social facts connected with the town, which the author has been able to obtain from different authentic sources. As a book, it is necessarily unreadable, for its multifarious details are reduced into no unity ; it can scarcely be said to have any literary form whatever, and its sentences, like the circumstances and things which they relate, lie side by side like pebbles in- a brook, and have equally little relation to one another. It may well be doubted whether any human being at the present day cares to know much that at the close of the twelfth century the town of Stratford obtained the privilege of a weekly market from Richard I. upon Thursday, and paid the Bishops an annual toll of sixteen shillings for the privilege. Nor, perhaps, is it of much more interest to the general reader that a female servant, hired at a salary of twenty-six shillings and eight- pence and a pair of shoes, left her master suddenly in 1611, anti was imprisoned in the town jail for doing so. The truth is that the present essay is neither one thing nor the other ; it is half a scholastic monograph, in which the completeness of the research is intended to atone for lack of general interest, and half a popular history of the Mrs. Markham type, descriptive of the state of life, manners, and customs in England from the tenth to the sixteenth century.
None of Mr. Lee's facts are particularly new ; but some of his details, as those, for instance, in connection with the growth of the early Guilds, are interesting. "The Guilds owed their origin to popular religious observances, and developed into insti- tutions of local self-help societies that were at once religious and friendly, ' collected for the love of God and our souls' needs.' Members of both sexes—and the women were almost as numer- ous as the men—were admitted on payment of a small annual subscription. This primarily secured for them the performance of certain religious rites, which they literally valued more than life. While they lived, and more especially after their death, lighted tapers were duly distributed in their behalf before the altars of the Virgin and of their patron saints in the parish church." Mr. Lee then drily remarks that " a poor man in the middle ages found it very difficult, without the intervention of the Guilds, to keep this road to salvation always open."
Let us now pass to the illustrations, which are by Mr. Edward Hull, and consist of a dozen etchings and a large quantity of wood engravings. The woodcuts are very much better than the etchings, for, without being specially beautiful, they are at least simple, unpretentious, and cleverly executed. The work upon the etchings has nearly every defect which it is possible for an etching to have. The drawing is poor, laboured, and inexpressive, the plates scrabbled all over with unnecessary and irrelevant lines, the planes of atmosphere insufficiently marked, the light and shade poorly combined and contrasted, and deficient in brightness and depth. More than this, there is throughout the work a very notable absence of all delicacy of gradation, large spaces
* Stiatford-on-Aliton, from the Earliest Times to the De ith of William Shakope-e. By Sidney L. Lee. London Seeley each C/o.
of the plate being worked in the sam e dull, uniform tone. We need go no further for an example of this than the frontis- piece, representing " Stratford Church from the River," in which it is bard to say which is the worst—the careless scrawl- ing of the trees, the lack of grace and accuracy in the drawing of the reeds, or the inexpressive piece in the middle-distance of the picture, which may be a field, and may be a wall, and may be a bank, and may possibly be intended for a part of the river itself, but which is in any case quite unintelligible. Not all the etchings are as bad as this, nor indeed most of them ; but all owe such merit as they possess, not to their quality as etchings, or their beauty as compositions of light and shade, but to a certain clear if somewhat thin veracity with which the artist draws the old houses and the interiors which form the subjects of the majority of illustra- tions. There is a certain dish very popular in Cornwall called a "junket," a vast flaccid mass of whitish matter, perfectly wholesome and perfectly tasteless, warranted to do no harm to any one, and perhaps very little good. This work upon Strat- ford seems to us to be an intellectual "junket" No one will be much the better for it, not even the publisher, and no one at all the worse. A typical gift-book, it will lie upon twenty or two hundred tables, and casual visitors will take it up in despair, and lay it down without regret. Our only grudge against it is that it adds another item to the already overwhelming list of books which no one wanted.
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