We have received from Messrs. Mackie sundry volumes be- longing
to their series of "English School Texts," Edited by W. H. D. Rouse, Litt.D. (6d. each). These are The Siege of Jerusalem
(from Lodge's translation of Josephns), An Embassy to the Great Mogul, The Voyages of Captain James (an early Arctic explorer), The Adventures of Montluc (translated by Cotton), A Sojourn at Lia-ssa, Prescott's Conquest of Peru, and De la 3fotte Fouques Sintram.—In the "Cameo Classics" (The Library Press) we have as many as twenty volumes, out of a large number, which it is not necessary to enumerate. We may mention those most recently out of copyright,—Charles Reade's Peg Woffington, Kingsley's Water Babies, and Silas Hamer. The paper and printing are not exactly of the first quality, but at 6d. net the books are very cheap, and the choice is distinctly good. There is no excuse for any one to be without good reading when it can be so easily obtained. But what is the living author to do ? De Quincey has a queer fancy somewhere of the dead, the incalculable and invincible majority, invading and overwhelming the living. This is actually happening in tho case of books. How can a mere modern expect to get a living wage for his work when he is thus undersold by the mighty dead? Who will give five shillings for the best that Brown, Jones, and Robinson can do when he can get Dickens and George Eliot and Charles Reade, not to speak of the elder classics, for sixpence ?
Previous page
