There's Pippins and Cheese to Come — Inside the Classic

A Stroll Through the City and the Page

The opening essay, 'There's Pippins and Cheese to Come,' establishes Brooks's method: a seemingly simple errand—finding a place to eat—becomes an occasion for playful description. He contrasts a 'not unsavory stowage' next door with a more refined restaurant uptown, describing the first with mock-heroic gusto: gravy 'lies about it like a moat around a castle,' and the diner attacks his rump of meat 'with pike advanced.' The second restaurant, with its pancake-flipping showman, is rejected in turn. Brooks's prose is studded with theatrical and literary allusions—Eve's serpent, Macbeth's 'pleasant seat,' the witch's cauldron from Macbeth—but these serve to heighten the ordinary rather than to instruct. The essay's title, a line from an old song, hints at a promised reward that never quite arrives; the piece ends not with a meal but with the pleasure of the walk itself.

April Foolery and the Credulous Eye

In 'The Friendly Genii,' Brooks turns to the calendar, arguing that spring's miracles—'the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutings'—make even the most outlandish tales believable. He imagines Baron Munchausen returning in April, and urges readers to play along with April Fools' pranks: 'If an urchin points his finger at your hat, humor him by removing it!' The essay is less about the holiday itself than about a mood of willing suspension of disbelief. Brooks's voice here is avuncular and gently philosophical, but the evidence is thin: the excerpt breaks off before the essay's conclusion, so we cannot know how he resolves the tension between credulity and jest. What remains is a characteristic blend of personal anecdote and general reflection, anchored by a specific date and a specific street scene.

The Attic Stage and the Lost Actor

The third excerpt, also from 'The Friendly Genii,' shifts to childhood theatre. Brooks recalls his own first performances: a curtain rigged from parlor hangings and safety pins, an audience of one cat, and a bout of 'snuffles' that kept him home from school. The tone is rueful and self-mocking: 'Surely you can no longer frisk lightly in a comedy. If you should wheeze and limp in an old man's part... would you not fear that it bordered on the truth?' The passage moves from the attic to the window, where the adult Brooks watches children playing ball and longs to join them. The essay's structure—a meditation on age and memory triggered by a specific sight—is typical of the collection. Brooks does not claim to have been a great actor; instead, he uses the small details of costume and stage fright to evoke a vanished world of make-believe.

Brooks's essays reward a patient reader who enjoys following a leisurely, associative thread. The excerpts show a writer more interested in the texture of a moment—the smell of a restaurant, the sound of children on the street—than in advancing a thesis. Readers should expect digressions, literary nods, and a tone that is conversational rather than urgent. The book's title, taken from an old English catchphrase, promises abundance; the essays deliver not argument but atmosphere.

Years of shelving taught me that Brooks’s 1917 essays, with their April whimsy and supper-table musings, share a quiet pulse with Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essays — Themes and Context. Both linger on the small furniture of daily life, that unhurried fellowship of digression—as if each writer knew the other’s pace and preferred it to any hurry.