BY-PATHS AND CROSS-ROADS.* MANY unappreciated authors, and some people who

are not authors at all, but only unliterary cynics, are wont to accuse critics of reviewing books without previously taking the trouble to read them; and the ancient joke about smelling the paper- knife is one of the mouldiest of witticisms. Of course, all well- informed people know that the random accusation—so far, at any rate, as reviewers of any standing are concerned—is altogether baseless ; but not less baseless is the implied inference that if a book be only read from cover to cover, the kind of reading is a matter of little or no consequence. Criti- cism, like all other contemporary occupations, is infected with the hurry of the age ; newspaper readers expect their literary tasters to be ready with their verdict while the new book is still damp from the press ; and there are some volumes which, if they are to be read adequately and appreciatively, must be read with that feeling of leisurely freedom which the critic in his. working days can so seldom enjoy.

Such a volume is Mrs. Panton's By-Paths and Cross-Roads, which positively refuses to yield up the full secret of its charm to any reader who is in a hurry. Let such a reader begin the first essay on page 1, plodding on steadily and persistently until he reaches the close of the thirty-second essay on page 287, and though he will doubtless feel that he has spent several happy hours in congenial companionship, his impres- sions will be vague and nebulous, like those recollections of pleasant dreams which fade from us at the moment of waking, and leave us with a dim consciousness that something delight- ful has been and gone. A good many years ago, an essayist whose work we have not seen of late, made a line from Wordsworth do duty as a title for a volume of collected papers, and called it The Harvest of a Quiet Eye. The name was more accurately descriptive than such adapted appellations are wont to be ; and had it not been thus appropriated by a predecessor, it would have served not less admirably to describe the quietly observant and sympathetically meditative papers which are to be found between the covers of Mrs. Panton's winning book. The mere writing of these pages may not have been very slow work : the pen may have slipped over the paper with the ease and celerity with which the reaping- machine clears the cornfield in autumn; but the harvest has been long in growing, and retains the sunshine of long summer days and the feeding dews of brief moonlit nights.

Our first glimpse of the volume led us to expect a collection of Nature-pictures similar to those which have of late years been painted so carefully and lovingly by Richard Jefferies, Mr. John Burroughs, and Mr. F. A. Knight ; and the expecta- tion is amply fulfilled by such essays as "A Suburban (harden," " A Lonely Spot," " Out of the World," " Leafy June," " Winter Walks," and a dozen others that might be mentioned ; but many of Mrs. Panton's wanderings have led her into the by-paths and cross-roads, not of Nature merely, but of homely human life,—the life of the simple dwellers in quiet villages, " far from noise and smoke of town ;" of decayed gentility, as it displays itself in some rural borough where culture runs low and party-spirit high ; of the working man in East London who finds the monotony of his life so delightfully broken by the free concerts of the People's Entertainment Society, where he can sit at his ease and drink in the strains —all the more enjoyable because so familiar—of "The

• By-Paths and Cross-Boads. By Mrs. J. B. nankin. London: Ward and Downey.

Leather Bottell," "The Powder-Monkey," and Nancy Lee." Perhaps these papers, which have a definite centre of human interest, will prove the most attractive to the greater number of Mrs. Panton's readers; but the Nature essays are so full of quiet charm, that some of us will want nothing better. The author has not the special knowledge which betrays itself on every page of the books of Richard Jefferies, and in every article from the pen of Mr. Knight,—that is, she is not a naturalist, though she has the instinct and habit of observa- tion which is the naturalist's most essential endowment : witness the pleasant opening of the essay entitled " Leafy June :"—

" In June the height of the year's pinnacle seems reached.

In the silence of the country everything is then at its best The trees are still rustling to the songs of the

birds, and each hedge has its garlands of wild roses, and its golden honeysuckle crown ; while in every ditch, on every hillside, the stately foxglove stands, bending down with its own weight of blossoms, some of which are already gone,—stolen, as the children believe, by the foxes themselves, for Sunday wear, and to prevent them from the dear delights of popping them vigorously on their dirty little paws. The barley has come into ear ; and the wheat has the fine, delicate hairy line down it that tells us it is out of bloom ; while scarlet poppies, faded to a sad pink where the sun has shone unchecked, peep out of the fields and nod to the big white marguerites and yellow corn-marigolds that are everywhere. The birds and creatures seem tame just now. As we lean over a gate and look lazily into a neighbour's field, we watch a great hare canter slowly from the hedge towards the middle of the grass. There he sits, his white tail just showing and the light shining through his erect ears with which he listens for every sound. He sits motionless, though one or two carriages pass near by ; but presently a small white dog pats along, and he is off straight for the wheatfield to the left."

We had intended that our quotation should include the still-life picture only, and that it should end with the sentence about the marguerites and corn-marigolds ; but we could not resist the little vignette of the hare, with that capital word "canter," which, in spite of its exclusively equine associations, hits off so perfectly the movement which, though so wholly graceful, has the piquancy given by the faintest possible suggestion of clumsiness. "The merry brown hares came

leaping," sang Charles Kingsley, and the " leaping " gives the spirit of the motion ; but the happy " canter" gives spirit and body in one; and that other word, "pats "—" a small, white

dog pats along "—is hardly less felicitous. We can not only see the little creature—a fox-terrier it must surely be—but we can hear the beat of the four light paws upon the country-road. Many people can observe, though even the gift of observation is rarer than some of us are apt to think it ; but to render the results of observation by a natural magic of language, which makes the fact as a whole immediately apprehensible by the imagination, is an exceptional gift even in an age when style is deified, and mastery in the art of putting things is regarded as the noblest achievement of the writer.

Personally we should feel it very difficult to choose between the simple Nature-studies, of which " Leafy June" is a sample, and the other pictures in which, while the background counts for much, or at any rate for something, the human figures count for more. Perhaps the best way to enjoy the book is to read it very slowly in an hour with no haunting engagement ahead of it—indeed, this method of perusal must be pronounced absolutely indispensable—and then to alternate the two classes of essays of which it is composed. In some of the papers human interest and nature interest are inextricably combined, as, for example, in the sketches—rich in subdued but very real pathos—of the suburb which has not yet ceased to be rural, but upon which the heavy, desolating hand of the creators of Nature-expelling villadom is heavily laid. What simple, human heartiness there is in the genial description of a " First

Night in an Unfashionable Locality," a paper already referred to, which has for its theme those East End people's concerts where, under the influence of such music as the hearers under- stand and love, it may surely be hoped that " the cares which infest the day," do indeed, at any rate for one short hour,— "fold their tents like the Arabs, And as silently steal away."

Pleasant indeed it is to go " By Coach," with Mrs. Panton to chat with us, as we bowl swiftly and smoothly along and revel in the " poetry of motion ;" to let her be our guide to the primitive unnamed village which is only " ten miles from town," and whence can be seen in the dim distance the dome of St. Paul's " rising like a solemn prayer or a wondrous mirage ;" or to accompany her on a new " Canterbury Pil-

grimage," and wander through the streets of the ancient Kentish city, "where history is crystallised and old times are modern once more." But among the whole thirty-two essays there is not one which has not its peculiar pleasantness, its special charm ; and the book is one which cannot be reviewed adequately by mere comment, but only by more copious quotation than we have room for here. We can only add one pretty little portrait from the sketch, " Out of the Tide," which takes us out of the busy streets into the quiet and calm of the wards of a children's hospital:—

"There are often remarkable results in the treatment 'the children receive in this charming house. Granny,' for instance, who announces her age as seven, but is gravely assured by the matron that she means 700, was brought to the hospital con- demned to lose both her legs; yet the doctors thought she could never stand the shock, for she was but a baby of four, and weak and puny besides ; but now after three years of bed, Granny had been drafted to the branch home at Bournemouth, with every hope that in a short time she will be able to get about on crutches, which, indeed, she may cast away in time, and progress on the very legs once utterly condemned as most useless and dangerous possessions. Granny has without exception the most hideous and battered specimen of a doll in bed with her that ever one's eyes fell upon ; but to Granny it is the embodiment of female grace and beauty, and is loved with a love that is most pathetic, for we can but think it is to her a species of reflex of her own battered little self, and that she gives to dolly some of the care and affection that are so lavishly bestowed upon herself ; and not even hearing of the attractions of a wonderful doll's house, recently given to the Bournemouth Branch, will induce Granny to leave her antiquated plaything behind her, for she i,s sure that it would cry drifful after her if she did. Indeed, Granny, though longing to see the sea and the beautiful pine-woods, about which other children returned therefrom for further treatment have told her, is full of compunction. She cannot understand what her dear, dear lady will do without her, and she holds the lady-superintendent's black dress with one thin little claw of a hand, and gazes at her as if she would rather see that kind and loving countenance than the broad blue Solent and the white and red cliffs of which she has heard so much."

There are times when we all of us feel a desire to escape for a while from the dusky highways of life, and when such times come, it is pleasant to have such companionship as that of Mrs. Penton in its by-paths and cross-roads.