A Happy Half - Century, and other Essays. By Agnes Repplier. (Gay
and Hancock. 5s.)—The "happy half-century," according to Miss Repplier, lay in the list twenty-five years of the eighteenth century and the first five-and-twenty of the nine- teenth, and it was happy because it was so easy then to become famous. Many people must have bad something of the same thought. How easy, thinks the minor poet, to have got a place in the " British Poets " if one had had the luck to live in the middle of the eighteenth ceutury. Hammond (the English. Tibullus), Green, Scott of Amwell, Beattie, who reads them now ? Still, they are in Olympus. Miss Repplier makes great fun of the men and women who formed the literary coteries of the Georgian period, of Letitia Barbauld, and Miss Aikin, and Miss Porter, and the rest of them. She is decidedly amusing, but we are not sure that she is just. Of course, their mannerism seems ridiculous to us. Nevertheless, they amused, and even instructed, their generation. It is at least arguable that there was as much good stuff in "Evenings at home" as in what we admire nowadays. But. Miss Repplier has something to say for herself, and this something no one will find hard to read.
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