FROM THE PORCH.*
LADY Rom:ries style of writing is delightful; we will even forgive her the repeated use of such an expression as " divaga- tion " for the sake of her gentle love of words ; yet it must be confessed that her new book is a bit disappointing. Perhaps it could not but be so ; perhaps we expected too much ; we ought not to have looked for more than a little passing gossip and conversation. from the porch. The disappointment lies in this, that the leaven of Lady Ritchie's personal recollection is hardly sufficient to leaven the whole lump ; and, grateful as we ought to be for any fresh memories at all of the great figures of the fading Victorian age, we feel that we have been given a rather unfair proportion of quotations and second. hand information and other people's memories. Here indeed is such a maze of writing concerning books, and discussions raised by speeches, that the figure of Tomlinson will not be kept from our minds :— "O this I have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say, And this they write that another man wrote of a earl in Norroway. .
0 none may reach by borrowed speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good mead that lies as fair within."
So in the "Art d'Itre GrandpIre " there is lacking that excep- tional intimacy and knowledge which alone could lend intereeb to en acconnt of a man's correspondence with his grandchild ; and even more in the "Discourse of Modern Sibyls" are we tantalized by the absence of actual recollection. The little essay is loosely strung together, and gives us but passing glimpses of Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Mrs. Oliphant, of whose sorrows and courage there is a most touching account, though we would willingly hear more of Charlotte Bronte, who once said, in a letter, of Lady Ritchie's father: " Thackemy called too, separately. I had a long talk with him, and I think he knows me now a little better than he did; but of this I cannot yet be sure; he is a great and strange man." We find more enjoyment, then, in those essays of Lady Ritchie's which are concerned entirely with matters of history, and not at all with personal memories; beet of these is the admirable account of Sainte Jeanne de Chantal, that amazing grandmother of the amazing Madame de Sevigne: Lady Ritchie has, at all events, the power of arousing our curiosity, and of making us eager to know more of that woman who was so truly in the world, but not of the world.
• From Ike Fora. By Lady Meld. Loader" Smith, Elder. sad .0 Vie. n•t.I
Previous page
