... . There seems no real reason why Baron Golosh should not have been a truly comical opera-bouffe. The humours of the parvenu are by no means exhausted, though they have been drawn upon since the beginning of drama. Unfortunately the adapter has been content to deal with the humours already handled, and the result is that one has a painful feeling of old acquaintance with the jokes. ...

... . BY DOROTHY LOWNDES. The butler had just announced Mr. Hervey, and then retired with courteous resentment of having been called up to admit so frequent a visitor. Dulcie threw down her book, and came forward to meet him before be could cross the room. Why, Dal, this is fortunate I was dying for someone to talk to, she said. Take that chair there. Take care don't sit on Dodo.' I have thrown ...

... .* We were all complaining a few weeks ago because Mr. Andrew Lang bad given us a true story-book. Truth is all very well, and is easy, as the venerable Abraham Coles told us; but Mr. Oscar Wilde and the souls have led us away from the odium mendacis, so that the best appraised virtue of the moment is the virtue of lying. This is perfectly fit and proper, for if superstition were taken from ...

... . The Ben Greet Comedy Company, which now includes Mr. Henry B. Irving (Sir Henry s elder son) as leading man, occupied the boards of the Richmond Theatre for three nights in last week, appearing in Masks and Faces, Money, and The Lady of Lyons. Notwithstanding the mark that Mr. Irving has already made on the Metropolitan stage by his performances in A Fool's Paradise, at the Garrick ...

... .* It is a far cry from the Gipsies to Mr. Francis Galton, but there is something in common between them. As out of astrology was born astronomy, and as chemistry is the offspring of alchemy, so is the science of finger-prints the descendant of palmistry. In the lines of the hand the soothsayers of Chaldæa read the fate, fortunes, and character of men. The Greeks practised the art, even ...

... .* The title of this book may be a little alarming to the nervous man who has read many novels lately in which life is represented as a flaming pathway of woman's vengeance for centuries of subjection, and in which he has stumbled in every page over the grisly, mouldering hones of man's fallen supremacy. The modern woman in Miss Dixon's story is not the aggressive champion of her sex, chanting ...

... . We are getting on in departmental fiction. Not only is Scotland so finely apportioned between the leading Scotch novelists that a brawl between them on the score of territorial boundary might he a distraction any day, but the ''common lands of this country are now wonderfully few. The prospect for the unborn novelist is not reassuring. It is possible that one of his first acts on coming to ...

... NOTES FEOM THE THEATEES. When it is stated that one of the chief points in The Chinaman is the jealousy of a man because he thinks that his wife's innocent attentions to her brother are guilty favours to a stranger, and that another is the successful endeavour of the hero to pass himself off as a Chinese mandarin at a moment's notice, though he knows nothing of the land or language, the ...

... .* We should nave pronounced The Fiddler of Carne a thing of-- Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim, but for its dedication. There we are initiated into its inner meaning as a fable of the disturbing effect of the appearance of a self-absorbed artist in a matter-of-fact and half-civilised community, ''teaching it strange lore; the ...

... '. By E. F. Benson. Heineviann 6s.) The sensitive critic approaches Mr. Benson's new book with a certain amount of diffidence. Up to the end of April, he has been charmed, amused, convinced. With the advent of May, however, there comes to him a sneaking suspicion that the author, after all, is merely spinning a yarn instead of adhering to his purpose of setting down the impressions of a year ...

... . By C. Ranger Gull. {Greening. 6s.) Air. Ranger Gtdl has yet to find his level At one time an ardent disciple in the school of Oscar Wilde, he has disported himself under the flags of various modern writers until, with His Grace's Grace, we find him striking an unhappy medium between Mr. Cotsford Dick and Miss Braddon. In other words, he is at one time ultra-epigrammatic, and at another ...

... . By Fred. Whishaw. {Chatto and Windus. 6s.) Under an unnecessarily melodramatic title, Mr. Fred. Whishaw tells the oft-told storv of the tragedy that forms the greatest blot upon the escutcheon of Peter, Emperor of All the Russias, called the Great, the notorious clearing of the horizon by the murder of the weakling Tsarevitch. In his book we see Peter the great barbarian rather than the ...