_Fudge Doings_ and _The Lorgnette_ may be looked on as a contribution to the history of manners. By their aid one reconstructs the drama of fashionable life in the mid-century, sees what was then thought monstrous, and incidentally learns how simple the vices of the grandfathers were. _Reveries of a Bachelor_ ushers one into a quaint and delightful world. The reveries are of love--whether, in the words of Robert Burton quoting Plotinus, ‘it be a God, or a divell, or passion of the minde.’ The book is by no means compounded exclusively of moonshine and roses. Some of the pictures are calculated to give a bachelor pause. Here is Peggy who loves you, or at least swears it, with her hand on the _Sorrows of Werther_. She is not bad looking, Peggy, ‘save a bit too much of forehead.’ But she is ‘such a sad blue’ who will spend her money on the ‘Literary World’ and the _Friends in Council_. By the severer standards of our day Peggy was not so much of a ‘blue.’ None the less she is distinctly literary. She reads Dante and ‘funny Goldoni’ and leaves spots of baby-gruel on a Tasso of 1680. She adores La Bruyère; even reads him while nurse gets dinner and ‘you are holding the baby.’ The vision presently becomes terrific and can only be dispelled by a vicious kick at the forestick. Revery, misnamed idleness, has its uses. Whatever else comes true, the Bachelor will not marry a young woman who consoles her husband for an ill-cooked dinner by quotations from the Greek Anthology. _Dream Life_ is also a collection of ‘reveries.’ Under the similitude of the seasons, the author has pencilled little sketches of boyhood, youth, manhood, and age. The temptation to the obvious in morals and sentiment must have been great; but again Mitchell’s literary skill and his humor carry him through successfully. _Seven Stories with Basement and Attic_ is a group of narratives drawn from the author’s ‘plethoric little note books of travel.’ The ‘Basement’ is the introduction, the ‘Attic’ the conclusion. The first story, ‘Wet Day at an Irish Inn,’ shows how, if he be observant, a man may have adventures without taking the trouble to cross the street in search of them. Three of the stories are French (‘Le Petit Soulier,’ ‘The Cabriolet,’ and ‘Emile Roque’); another is Swiss (the ‘Bride of the Ice King’); yet another is Italian (‘Count Pesaro’), and all are exquisite, written in a style which for sweetness and unaffected ease is, if not a lost art, at all events a neglected one. It has been said that our young men would not care to write in this fashion to-day; it is a question whether our young men would be able to do so.