The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1887, page 239 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download240
after.
For this is a book to be read many times by those loving to feel the conscious felicity of a writer who knows that every sentence shall happily express his mind, and succeed in winning the reader to the next. The security is tacit in the earlier papers here reprinted; in the later ones it is more declared, and becomes somewhat careless, though it can never beget slovenliness. It appears to this great master that what he does so easily can scarcely be worth doing, and he mocks his own facility.
The spirit of the book is the same throughout. It is not different from that of Thackeray's other books, and it is that of a man too sensible of his own love of the advantages he enjoys from the existing state of things ever to assail, with any great earnestness of purpose, the errors and absurdities of the world,--who trusted, for example, in one of his essays, never to be guilty of speaking harshly either of the South or North of America, since friends in both sections had offered him equally good claret. He is forever first in his art; and if we do not expect too much from him, he gives us so much that we must rejoice over every line of his preserved for our perusal.
A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, "Rock me to Sleep, Mother." By A. O. MORSE, of Cherry Valley, N. Y. New York: M. W. Dodd.
It is no great while since Miss Peck proved to her own satisfaction her claim to what Mr. Morse would style the "maternity" of "Nothing to Wear," and now hardly has Judge Holmes of Missouri determined that the paternity of Shakespeare is due to Bacon, when the friends of Mr. Ball of New Jersey spring another trouble upon mankind by declaring him the author of Mrs. Akers's very graceful and touching poem, "Rock me to Sleep, Mother," which we all know by heart. In the present pamphlet they give what evidence they can in Mr. Ball's behalf, and, to tell the truth, it is not much. It appears from this and other sources that M