CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Better Self: Essays for Home Life. By HaM Fria well. (Henrys. King and Co.)—This is a book which is sure to excite a good deal of unkind and even unjust criticism. Mr. Friswoll has attained by his previous works a degree of success which is, to say the least, quite equal to his literary merits, and he writes in a manner somewhat aggravatingly didactic. A spice of cynicism or doubt in these essays would probably have commended them to the favour of some who will find them, as it is, somewhat vapid and dull, with their unfailing recommendation of everything that is respectable and orthodox in practice and belief. To any reader who knows what an essay can be made, they are certainly not inspiriting, but there is good-feeling and good-sense in them. A really annoying feature about them is a certain slipshod manner. The writer's style is not good ; his allusions are not accurate. What could be worse than to say of a stern father that he was "a Dissenter and a teetotaller, severely as to both"? What, again, more inane than the thought in the following?—"As civilisation and the knowledge of sister nations reform, purify, and elevate a nation, so sisters in a family im- prove and elevate the boys." That sisters do good to boys, no one need doubt, but what is there corresponding to this feminine influence in the intercourse between nations ?
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