Page:Doom of the Great City - Hay - 1880.djvu/60

 tion of the States, he pronounces to be a conspicuous failure. ‘It has more extensively introduced the rum jug into the family circle. Old and reliable physicians throughout the States now report a fourfold increase in cases of delirium tremens. To-day a man with four inches of Maine whisky in him is not less dangerous than a wild beast.’ These are striking words, and Mr. Day has done well to quote them and to comment upon them as he has done. There, however, we must leave his book. Enough has probably been said to show that the work thoroughly deserves the character given to it at the outset, inasmuch as it deals with a great variety of topics, and treats of all with knowledge, common sense, and sound judgment. The present volume is described as the first series; few readers will put it down without wishing for the second.”—Morning Advertiser.

“I find that you have fully succeeded in bringing out, with much force and talent, the most prominent features of American life.”—Prince Camille de Polignac.

“There is a feeling of peculiar pleasure in welcoming back an old writer of the highest order to the scene of his ancient triumphs, and in finding that the hand has lost none of its old cunning nor the brain a particle of its inspiration. This is eminently the case with Mr. Richard Hengist Horne Since the day when the veteran author astonished the literary world with that celebrated and most noble of contemporary poems, ‘Orion,’ nothing more striking than his latest work has come from his pen; not even the sombre splendours of ‘Cosmo de Medici’ or ‘The Death of Marlowe’ can cast ‘Laura Dibalzo’ into the shade. The plot turns upon the sufferings of the Neapolitan patriot nobles during the last evil days of King Bomba; whilst wifely constancy to a husband’s honour rather than his life inspires the play and works up to a climax than which nothing finer has been conceived since the catastrophe of ‘Venice Preserved.’ Laura’s dying cry makes one sigh for the days when Helen Faucit might have put the last scene of this noble play before our bodily eyes, and her wonderful voice thrilled us with the agony of these last lines: