The sensations of one who has not previously met Mr.
Tighe in literature must be, upon reading this book, those of extreme amazement. He is like a mercurial Mr. Arnold Bennett. Seen ' from another angle it is like watching a beef-steak pie being made. The choppy little sentences are for all the world like pieces of very nourishing meat, and the author flings them in generously, with a dash of salty wit and a solid crust of sense over all. It is a book about London, yet it is a eulogy of the country. London is shown in a kind of sick miasma. The author's favourite characters fly from it, start poultry farms, marry farm labourers, live among African lions. Even Aunt Susan, a delicious person with a pungent wit, retires to a country cottage, where we leave her contemplating marriage with a farmer. Has he not presented her with a cauli- flower ? Is it not an infallible sign of matrimonial intentions when a gentleman brings to the house of a lady solid food ? And there is a good deal of truth in Aunt Susan's philosophy, for man is a simple and direct creature, and just as the black- bird brings delectable worms to his brooding mate, so man nourishes what he loves. If one cannot resist recalling Dickens and Mrs. Nickleby's immortal, " Kate, my dear, another vegetable marrow I " that is not to say that Mr. Tighe is unoriginal, for Aunt Susan comes as straight from Nature as her cauliflower did from her admirer's garden.
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