A Cluster of Lives. By Alice King. (Henry S. King
and Co.)— These papers should be called "Sketches" rather than "Lives"; they are in no case complete,—some of them almost entirely fail in giving the reader any idea of their subject. Even considered as sketches, they must be held to be sometimes curiously deficient. The author aims at the picturesque, and she sometimes omits to mention the most pic- turesque of available incidents. In an account of Galileo, who would not expect to find some mention of the famous " Still it moves " and of Milton's visit, and in a life of Spenser some speculation about the missing six books of the " Faorie Queene "? About Spenser, indeed, Miss King is evidently very much in the dark. "Soon after his return to England," she says, "he lost his friend Sidney, who died from a wound in Holland ;" and in the next paragraph, " Spenser survived his friend twelve years,—twelve years of failing health and straitened means, &c." It is a pity that she did not get up the dates a little better. Sidney died in 1586, eleven years before Spenser's return to England. The twelve years during which the poet survived his first patron, instead of being years of failing health, were the period of his chief literary activity, and till the fatal blow of the Rebellion were sufficiently happy and prosperous. One step, then, that Miss King must take toward improvement is more diligence about facts ; another is the necessity of pruning her style of superfluous ornaments. Such sentences as "the sweet patient face smiles on us of her whose love lay as a glow-worm in the corner of Louis's heart, even when his short-lived flames of sensuous passion burnt the brightest," and "her [Laura's] character was as stainless as the first snow-flake which fell on the summit of the Estrelles," are possibly pleasant to write, but they do not attract readers of taste. A third necessity will be to avoid such extraordinary efforts of reasoning as that by which she attempts to fix approximately the slate of Spenser's birth :—" The first authenticated fact we have of the poet's life is his trying for and losing a fellowship at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Andrewes, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, was his suc- cessful opponent in this academical struggle. Andrewes was born in 1555, and the date of his birth gives us the best clue to that of Spenser, for we may consider as probable that the two rival candidates were near of an age. As, however, Spenser was beaten, and as he could not have been in intellectual power behind Andrewes, we may reason- ably conclude that he was the younger." The argument of the last sentence certainly displays a certain "feminine rapidity."
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