Life — April 14, 1887 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MR. WHEELWRIGHT'S “DRIVES” AT BOSTON. I‘ is refreshing to find a Boston writer who is not so oppressed with the surpassing intellectual greatness of that center of learning but that he can make a little mild fun of his fellow-townsmen. John T. Wheelwright has had the temerity to make the hero of his novel, “A Child of the Cen- tury” (Charles Scribner's Sons), a man who was “suffering from a severe attack of Boston,” and who, to escape from the | depressing atmosphere, fied to Europe only to fall in love. It would appear from this that the only cure for a “severe attack of Boston is to divert the disease from its acute form of se/f-love to the love of another. If the external object of affection is a rich and beautiful girl from Cincinnati, the cure will probably be complete and permanent. . . . ND Mr. Wheelwright, with still more audacity, says | through one of his characters : “There must be some life in Boston, outside of the novels, as dramatic as it is else- where, The novelists of the day delight in analyzing men’s motives; and it seems to me that many of them have taken out all their works so often to inspect them, that, like the litle boy who performs this operation upon his father's Frodsham watch, they cannot put them together again.” These are the sentiments which Lire has persistently assert- ed for three or four years, and we welcome Mr. Wheelwright to | great deal of sharp, crisp, every-day American-English. It is not extremely elegant, but it is expressive, and (to follow his example) “it gets there all the same.” | ‘These American witticisms sparkle on a good many pages. | Often they do not ring quite true, or are “ stale and unprofit- | able” through age. But they are bright enough to keep one | awake and wondering what is on the next page. It was cer- tainly a good, though not entirely novel, thing to say that | Sewell had been brought to manhood “under the zxgis | of a protective tariff and a Puritan ancestry ;" that “in most | cases a man in love is a nuisance to everybody,” and that four Boston girls “ appeared used to society, yet, at the same time, inured to a lack of attention from men.” . * . HE first half of this novel is the best. Even the con- ventional transatlantic voyage is attractively described, and Paris and Etretat are made interesting. From the time of Sewell’s return to Boston the story loses its coherence. We are given a Mugwump campaign in that city, a Speaker- ship fight in Washington, the usual rich-man’s ball for politi- cal purposes, and a very commonplace defalcation. They have little to do with the story—indeed almost any kind of } incident could have been used to fill in the necessary interval of agony between the Boston man’s discovery that he was in love, and the time when his courage reaches the proposing point. He seems to have been an exceedingly faint-hearted lover for a Mugwump. Droch. + NEW BOOKS - a front seat on the “mourner’s bench” of repentant Bostonians, | May he never write any more verses about “savage critics who “stab the Bostonese,” but keep right on in his good work of doing a little satirical stabbing on his own account! Te author has also dared to do another thing at which his fellow-Bostonians will be shocked—he has used a THE FEUD OF OAKFIELD CREEK. A Novel of California Life. ty Josiah Royce. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, The Latest Studies on Indian Reservations, By J.B. Harrison, Rights Association, Philadelphia. Natural Law in the Business World. By Henry Wood. Lee & Shepard Practical Cheiresophy. Synoptical Study of the Science of the Hand. By Edward Heron-Allen. G. P, Putaam’s Sons. Christ before Pilate. A Steel Engraving of Mupkacsy's Painting, Pub- lished by T. B. Peterson & Brothers, Philadelphia. Indu, SEWED WITH THE WRONG MACHINE. HENDERSON DETECTS A LOOSE THREAD IN THE SEAM OF HIS NEW SPRING TROUSERS, A QUICK PULL REVEALS THE FACT] THAT HIS TROUSERS WERE NOT MADE ENTIRELY BY HAND, comicbooks.com