31 JANUARY 1891, Page 39

Bombaugh, enlarging in this volume an earlier work of the

same kind, has collected (" collated" is his term, a word not so used in common speech) a vast number of curious things. Never did Martial's description more truly apply. There are many hi- different, more bad, and a few good. The efforts of misplaced ingenuity (as when Lord Holland wrote a page of prose from which every vowel except "e" was excluded), puns of every kind, acrostics, repartees, Irish "bulls," misquotations, blunders of the Press (a meagre show, by-the-way), singular customs, epigrams, epitaphs, parallel passages (a section which we recommend to the ingenious gentlemen who are always discovering plagiarisms), and miscellaneous anecdotes, make up a volume into which one may dip with a fair chance of being entertained.