Old Friends : Essays in Epistolary Parodies. By Andrew Lang.
(Longmans.)—To say that Mr. Lang has written a clever book is superfluous, for Mr. Lang can write nothing which is not clever. Old Friends has the additional merit of originality. It was a happy thought to bring together the heroes and heroines of con- temporary romances, to introduce Mrs. Proudie to Becky Sharp, and Lovelace to Tom Jones, and Miss Austen's Catherine Morland to Rochester and Jane Eyre, and Dickens's Montague Tigg to the Comte de Monte Cristo, and Harold Skimpole to Thackeray's Charles Honeyman. " Most of those delightful sets of old friends, the Dickens and Thackeray people," Mr. Dobson writes, " might well have met, though they belonged to very different worlds. In older novels, too, it might easily have chanced that Mr. Edward Waverley, of Waverley Honour, came into contact with Lieutenant Booth, or, after the Forty-five, with Thomas Jones, or, in Scotland,
Balmawhapple might have foregathered with Lieutenant Lismaha- gow. Might not even Jeanie Deans have crossed the path of Major Lambert of the ' Virginians,' and been helped on her way by that good man ? It is agreeable to wonder what all these very real people would have thought of their companions in the region of Romance, and to guess how their natures would have acted and reacted on each other. This was the idea which suggested the following little essays in parody." Some of the parodies are very successful ; as, for instance, the letters between 'Harold. Skimpole and the Rev. Charles Honeyman, and the rather wicked letter from Mrs. Gamp, which is not intended for Mr. Gladstone's perusal. A lifelike picture of Tom Jones is drawn by Lovelace in a letter to his old friend John Belford, and a charming correspondence between Bunyan and Isaak Walton is one of the gems of the book. The parodies, indeed, despite a few obvious failures and inconsistencies, are full of choice morsels, which will be welcome to all lovers of good literature. The essay with which the brilliant little volume opens is written in Mr. Lang's happiest style.
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