HORTUS VITAE.
Hortus Vttae : Essays on the Gardening of Life. By Vernon Lee.
(John Lane. 3s. 6d.)—All who are familiar with the previous discursive writing of "Vernon Lee" know what to expect from
a fresh volume of essays from her pen, at least on such almost Addisonian subjects as "New Friends and Old," "In Praise of Silence," "The Blame of Portraits," "In Praise of Courtship," "Making Presents," "Going Away," and "Coming Back." They will look for, and they will find, the grace of diction that marks one who is at once a inondaine and a cosmopolitan, and a grace of thought that sometimes recalls Mrs. Meynell and sometimes R. L. Stevenson, and even here and there reminds one of Emerson. It may be complained that this book is not profound in this sense, that it does not deal with sin and misery at their worst and deepest. But "Vernon Lee" unquestionably writes out of the wealth of her experiences—her "dedication" gives certain of their number a positively pathetic character—and although some may seem superficial and to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton (if one may judge from his "Renascence of Wonder ") positively "genteel," yet they are perfectly real. and have the stamp of genuine, if also somewhat worldly, pensiveness. Of true kindliness in the best sense there is no lack, as such an essay as "In Praise of Governesses" freely demon- strates. No book quite so good of the same kind has lately been published. The average moralisation in it may fairly be gathered from such a passage as this from "Against Talking ":—"'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would pick quarrel, particularly if they are well-read, unprejudiced, subtle of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two 9r three persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate and patient fingering ; analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts."
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