He tells of a nervous bridegroom who, confusing the
baptismal and marriage ceremonies, replied when asked if he consented to
take the bride for his wife: 'I renounce them all'; of a Hampshire rustic
who, when giving the ring, said solemnly to the bride: 'With my body I
thee wash up, and with all my hurdle goods I thee and thou'; of another
who, when asked whether he would take his partner to be his wedded wife,
replied with shameful indecision: 'Yes, I'm willin'; but I'd a sight
rather have her sister'; and of a Scotch lady who, on the occasion of her
daughter's wedding, was asked by an old friend whether she might
congratulate her on the event, and answered: 'Yes, yes, upon the whole it
is very satisfactory; it is true Jeannie hates her gudeman, but then
there's always a something!' Indeed, the good stories contained in this
book are quite endless and make it very pleasant reading, while the good
advice is on all points admirable.

Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful
collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a
perfect museum of salt-cellars. We strongly recommend this book as one
of the best of wedding presents. It is a complete handbook to an earthly
Paradise, and its author may be regarded as the Murray of matrimony and
the Baedeker of bliss.

How to be Happy though Married: Being a Handbook to Marriage. By a
Graduate in the University of Matrimony. (T. Fisher Unwin.)

HALF-HOURS WITH THE WORST AUTHORS

(Pall Mall Gazette, January 15, 1886.)

I am very much pleased to see that you are beginning to call attention to
the extremely slipshod and careless style of our ordinary
magazine-writers. Will you allow me to refer your readers to an article
on Borrow, in the current number of Macmillan, which exemplifies very
clearly the truth of your remarks? The author of the article is Mr.
George Saintsbury, a gentleman who has recently written a book on Prose
Style, and here are some specimens of the prose of the future according
to the systeme Saintsbury:

1. He saw the rise, and, _in some instances, the death, of Tennyson_,
Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens.

2. _See a place_ which Kingsley, _or_ Mr. Ruskin, _or_ some other master
of our decorative school, _have_ described--_much more_ one which has
fallen into the hands of the small fry of their imitators--and you are
almost sure to find that _it has been overdone_.

3. The great mass of his translations, published and unpublished, and
the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt _deserves_ judicious
excerption.

4. 'The Romany Rye' _did not appear_ for six years, _that is to say, in_
1857.

5. The elaborate apparatus which most prose tellers of fantastic tales
_use_, and generally _fail in using_.

6. The great writers, whether they try to be like other people or try
not to be like them (_and sometimes in the first case most of all_),
succeed _only_ in being themselves.

7. If he had a slight _overdose_ of Celtic blood and Celtic-peculiarity,
it was _more than made up_ by the readiness of literary expression which
it gave him. He, if any one, bore an English heart, though, _as there
often has been_, there was something perhaps more than English as well as
less than it in his fashion of expression.

8. His flashes of ethical reflection, which, though like _all_ ethical
reflections _often_ one-sided.

9. He certainly was an _unfriend_ to Whiggery.

10. _That it contains_ a great deal of quaint and piquant writing _is
only to say_ that its writer wrote it.

11. 'Wild Wales,' too, because of _its_ easy and direct _opportunity_ of
comparing its description with the originals.

12.