Our author is a poet, but no mysticism or sentimentalism disfigures his
pages; he is a clear, keen observer and analyzer of human nature,
lashing its vices, discerning its foibles, and reading its subterfuges
and petty vanities. He says: 'The only apologies which he offers for
appearing as a censor and a teacher, are his love of men, his honest
wish to do them good, and his sad consciousness that his nominal
criticisms of others are too often actual condemnations of himself.'
He addresses himself in a series of letters to the Joneses of
Jonesville, each Jones addressed being a typal character and such as is
of frequent occurrence in our midst. Homely and excellent advice,
appropriate to their faults and needs, is administered to each
individual Jones in turn, as he falls under the salutary but sharp
scalpel of this keen dissector. There are twenty-four letters,
consequently twenty-four studies from life, true to reality and detailed
as a Dutch picture. We feel our own faults and foibles bared before us
as we read. While these pages are very interesting to the general
reader, the divine may learn from them how best in his preaching to aim
his shafts at personal follies, and the novelist find models for his
living portraitures and varied pictures.
THE WATER BABIES: a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby. By the
Rev. Charles Kingsley, Author of 'Two Years Ago,' 'Amyas Leigh,'
etc.
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