The New Edition of Surtees
Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour (2 vols.), Hillingdon Hall, Mr; Facey Romford's Hounds, Plain or Ringlets and five . volumes reviewed in.. our issue of December 7th : Handley Cross (2 vols.), Ask Mamma (2 vols.), Hawbuck Grange (Eyre and Spottiswoode. £17 10s.)
THE fame of Surtees will probably rest as securely: on his character-drawing as on the good runs and great dinners which he describes with such infectious pleasure. Our friends Soapey and Facey (and surely the latter with his tall, spare frame is an unconscious portrait of the author ?)
give us hunts that have never been equalled in English, but through both their lives glitter the eyes of lAtey, who came from the cigar shop and the stage to amaze the Shires with her hard riding on the mouse-coloured " Leotard." As we follow her fortunes, first with the egregious Sponge and then with the hard-bitten Romford until the sad day when she is cut by the Countess of Caperington, we find a story within a story. The people of Surtees have caught his own immense vitality, they are' so much alive that we Want to know far more of their future than their author tells us.
Jogglebury Crowdey, for instance, of Puddingpote Bower, with his dozen offspring and carved walking-sticks---What does he say to " Mrs. Jog " when she has her thirteenth ?
And how long will he continue to sit on the Bench ? , Does he carve any more heads of Sir Robert Peel ? And what does Mr. Jorrocks do when he beconries it Member of Parliament at the end of Hillingdon Hall? Does Mrs. Jorrocks suspect the morals of " Betsey " ? When Facey makes his fortune in Melbourne (as we are sure he will) does he return to England and hunt his own hounds ?
The five volumes now reviewed complete the commendable enterprise of Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode in producing facsimiles of the original editions illustrated by Leech and
" Phiz " and others. These volumes give the whole of the original text of the novels (but I wish that Jaunts and Jollities had been added, and the hunting sketches from the New
Sporting Magazine) and the whole of the original- illustrations including the hand-coloured steel engravings of Leech, which are masterpieces of book illustration. The publishers Claim that these books. contain " a microcosm of England in the days when she was most prosperous and most alive," and they are right. They might have added that Surtees,
being a genius, is not " dated " except in the dress and inci- dentals of his people.
His method, I think, is rather similar to that of Mr. Evelyn Waugh. His women wear ringlets and crinolines, and his men whiskers and tight overalls, but their minds are much like ours, and they laugh at the same things. Surtees is modern, too, in Irks horror of cruelty. His observations on stag-hunting were about a century before his time ; and when a young lady asked Facey Romford, over his soup,
whether he was fond of 'flowers, he answered that he was —`• and I'm fond of hounds, but I don't like having them in the dinner-room." One could quote Pigg on farming, Jorrocks on protective tariffs, Lucy Glitters on women's place in the hunting field, and. be thoroughly up to date. But Surtees needs no eulogy at this hour or from this pen, and a critical comparison of -his earlier and later work would
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