text:  Confining himself to no particular line of subject he rambles through the different departments of light literature in a most agreeable and desultory manner; to-day a tourist to-morrow a novelist; the next day surprising his public by an excursion into the regions of historical romance amongst the well-beaten highways and byways of which he still manages to discover an untrodden path or to embellish a familiar one by the sparkle of his wit and industry of his researches