Punch, or the London Charivari, page 29 by Various Authors
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yed a difficult hand without fault. Miss NINA SEVENING, as a consoler of handsome men in trouble, and Miss FLORENCE LLOYD, as Caroline's maid, competently rounded off in subsidiary rôles the work of the principals.
Yes, undoubtedly a brilliant performance.
T.
[Illustration: BLIGHTED TROTH.
Caroline Ashley . . . . . . . Miss IRENE VANBRUGH.
Robert Oldham . . . . . . . Mr. LEONARD BOYNE.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: Huntsman. "GIVE US A BIT O' ROOM! YOU WAS NEARLY IN MY POCKET THAT TIME."
Flat-race Jockey. "ROOM? WHY, I WAS NEARLY HALF A LENGTH BEHIND YOU."]
* * * * *
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerics.)
THE evolution of the long novel appears to be following that of the human race. Instead of the individual, the family now threatens to become the central unit. I confess that this prospect, as evidenced by Three Pretty Men (METHUEN), fills me with some just apprehension. Mr. GILBERT CANNAN has set out to tell how a Scotch family, three brothers, a mother, and some sisters in the background, determines to make its fortune in a South Lancashire city (very recognisable under the name of Thrigsby), and how eventually all but one of them succeed. It is a long book and a close; and the dialogue (which of its kind is good dialogue, crisp and illuminating), being printed without the usual spacing, produces an indigestible-looking page that might well alarm a reader out for enjoyment. The book, in its record of the progress of the three, Jamie and Tom and John, is really more a study of social conditions in mid-Victorian Manchester than a work of imagination. But there is clever character-drawing in it, especially in Jamie, who from a worldly point of view is the failure of the group, making no money, and drifting through journalism to emigration; and in the finely suggested figure of <