Life — May 19, 1904 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

-LIFE- ARK TIAIN has pointed out that the general idea about New Zealand is that it “lies somewhere near Australia and is reached by a bridge.” In like manner the average man knows Cardi- nal Newman only as having led the Oxford movement with Darwin and Huxley and having received the red hat for his services, It is unlikely that William Barry's Cardinal Newman will do much toward upsetting this idea, but to the intellectually curious the volume is interesting as an attempt on the part of one who thinks he knows how to explain what he calls ‘a religious genius.” It seems possible that, in writing The Jssue, George Morgan had in mind the creation of a southern pendant to The Crisis. Certainly in no other recent work have men of national prominence been introduced with such artistic success and with so marked an effect of geau- ine portraiture, The story itself is long, cov- ering the thirty years preceding the Civil War, and, in the matter of plot, does not rise above the average, but its many vivid scenes and general literary style place it well to the fore in current fiction. If there is any truth in the belief that the times breed the man, there should be an un- discovered Juvenal somewhere amongst us, for the age cries aloud fora satirist. But he must use a goose-quill dipped in vitriol and honey—not a stylographic pen filled with French dressing. Of this last school we have mary disciples, and Albert Bigelow Paine is of the number. Since he wrote Zhe Van Dwellers Mr. Paine has moved from Harlem to New Jersey, and The Commuters chroni- cles the mild humor and rural gains of the transfer, Mr. Paine's recipe for French dressing, however, lacks paprika, Josephine Daskam's Memoirs of a Baby is another volume of mild satire and mild humor which is likely to win the hearts and tickle the risibles of happy pioneers in Stork: land, For strangers to that country, and for old settlers there, its appeal is hardly wide enough. Tastes differ in pessimism, Some of us * prefer to take ours straight, when we need it, knowing an occasional dose of Schopen- hauer to be tonic and wholesome, energizing to the psychologic liver, and clearing to the mental eye. John Oliver Hobbes, however, believes in dilute but regular doses, and her new novel, Zhe Vineyard, is very cleverly compounded on these lines. It is a study of flavor of the pessimistic salt is never quite absent and never quite revealed. It is doubtless our pious duty to hold up protesting hands at Miriam Michelson’s Je the Bishop's Carriage, whose heroine is a foundling and a thief acd should be frowned upon by good society. It is our duty, and—w: don’t, Nance Olsea may be a bad thief, but she is a good heroine, her adventures are great fun, and.even if it is only in fiction, it is nice to read of some one's getting the better of the Theatrical Trust. Sidney Pickering's novel, The Key of Paradise, is an easy and en- joyable bit of light reading. It is a tale of Rome and Naples in 1800, a pretty love story with a touch of exciting doings, and never a glimpse of the historically romantic notables of that time and region THE BLISSFVL CARMAN A SINGER AND A POET FROM NAGA ONDIA the shoddy side of human nature which thinks itself great things, and the acrid sub- comicbooks.com