With Amy in Brittany. By Sir Philip Burne-Jones, Bart. (Sidney
Appleton. 3s. 6d.)—The " Amy " with whom Sir Philip Burne-Jones made a week's trip was the motor-car of a pair of cousins, and the little volume in which he describes the tour is a very pleasant one. Its characteristic note is a certain alert and sparkling simplicity of matter and manner. It tells us nothing remarkable, nothing sensational, nothing profound or new. But it carries us along in sympathy with the machine—sometimes so willing, sometimes so reluctant and irritating—and its cheery occupants. We see Mont St. Michel, Avranches, Le Mans, with the eyes of the imagination, much helped by the pencil of the writer, who is his own illustrator. We make acquaintance by the same medium with various homely types of French men and women, and we get a lesson in national humility from con- trasted pictures of our own Board-school boys on their way to school and the model French boy and girl on the same road to education. Our children, alas ! appear in illustra- tion as repulsive figures of Pandemonium—"rough gangs of urchins who rush along the streets, shouting and screaming at the top of their voices, and such voices, too !"—whereas on the opposite page, above and below a very pretty sketch of a singularly attractive pair of youngsters or youngstresses—their sex is quite indistinguishable, so good and wise do they look—we read that "in France the children almost invariably pass quietly and decently through the public thoroughfares, walking in orderly couples, and rarely, if ever, raising their voices above the pitch of ordinary conversation." Without presuming to question the general wholesomeness for English readers of this contrast and its lessons, we should like to ask whether it is the pitch of ordinary English or ordinary French conversation that the icaier and ecoliire so seldom rise above ? Also, whether Sir Philip is quite sure that the contrast had nothing to do with differences in his own nerves and temper during his holiday and just before it? Anyway, all the little sketches in the book are charming,—even those which merely show us the objects of still life the trio took with them. The pictorial washing-list is an inspiration of genius or common-sense which thousands of tourists lacking colloquial French will be eager to imitate next time they travel.
THE FEMININE NOTE IN FICTION.
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