10 OCTOBER 1891, Page 11

A Fair Free - Lance. By Sir Gilbert Campbell. (Routledge and Son.)—This

is a book of the " shocker " kind, though, we presume, not priced at the modest shilling. The horrors ate of a conventional kind. Squire Thelluson, a violent and lawless sort of person, who goes about with bloodhounds (credited, of course, with a ferocity which does not belong to them), marries, as a second wife, a Jewish adventuress. She bears a son, and of course schemes to secure the estate for him, to the exclusion of the elder children. This is not the worst; she makes furious love to the young man who is her step-daughter's betrothed, puts her husband out of the way, There is a public, it is to be pre- sumed, which takes pleasure in these books—else why are such multitudes published ?—but they can scarcely be called literature.