Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/96

 tures of the State are already estimated at $30,000,000 per annum. The best mining machinery in the Union is made here. The assessed value of real and personal property increased in 1867 about $21,000,000, runling up the total taxable values of the State to some $221,000,000, and showing a gain of twenty per cent. in two years, the most prosperous years ever experienced in the State.

Seven hundred pages imperial octavo are devoted to facts like these. But only two pages are devoted to the libraries and literature of the State!—not perhaps an erroneous indication of the relation which one interest has heretofore been deemed to sustain to the other. Let us hope that since so good an account has been given of our natural wealth, something may yet worthily be written of the intellectual wealth and culture of the State. The book will go into public and private libraries as the best authority extant concerning most of the topics of which it professes to treat.

The admirers of this wonderful man—Mr. George Lawrence—need not look beyond the titles of the chapters of this novel, or indeed of the novel itself, to know that it is worthy of his steel. Given, a gentleman of the "thirteenth hundredth year of Grace," with the name of "Brakespeare," and we can imagine what follows, The author is sufficiently far removed into the region of pure romance to indulge now his wildest dream of muscular activity. The feats of Guy Livingstone, which, to say the least, were scarcely probable in the nineteenth century, are perfectly consistent with the thirteenth. We hear the old "dull, ominous crash;" we see "the face set as a flint stone, dark and pitiless;" we hear "the low moan of intense, half-conscious agony," and we never think of calling for the Police. For this is the fourteenth century—or as Mr. Lawrence would say—"God wot, these be parlous times." He revels not only in "gages," "corselets," "vamplates" and "habergeons," but, in the language of the period, intermixed with scraps of monkish Latin and Norman French. That he feels an intense satisfaction in speaking of a man as "a leal knight and stalwart," of saying "pardie," "De par Dieu," "Messire" and "Beau Sire," and "mine" for "my," no one acquainted with that gentleman's chivalric weakness will for a moment doubt. When we state that "Ralph Brakespeare" at the very outset of his thrilling career embraces his favorite bloodhound, feels for her heart and drives his dagger home; and when we add that he does this with his eye glistening with the tear of muscular sensibility, because he fears the dog may be lonely in his absence, we give the reader a touching idea of the moral perfections of Mr. Lawrence's hero.