CURRENT LITERATURE.
Four-handed Chess. By G. H. Verney. (Routledge.)—One of the papers complained lately that now that the days were getting short, and the nights long, we should have a dull spell of it ; no more cricket, rowing, tennis, no more dolee far niente in the evening garden, for many a month. Here is a famous new game for the dark hours, or rather an old friend made much more sociable and sprightly, and very
clearly explained to the player, in this little book. The present writer has played chess, off and on, more or less for nearly fifty years, and he deliberately says, though of course only for himself, that as long as he can handle a pawn he will be " off " chess for two and " on " chess for four,—play more of this, and less of that. It is a much brisker, more dashing game—fancy four queens careering about the board !—a game of greater variety and infinitely cheerier, than the ordinary game ; and with this crowning charm,—when you are beaten, you can lay the flattering unction to your soul that it was all the fault of your duffer of a partner, and you can tell him a bit of your mind with a self-satisfied glow, instead of creeping, with throbbing brow and icy feet, crest-fallen and over-matched, to bed as was too often our lot, in the mimic warfare of other days.
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