Tales of a Far Biding. By Oliver Onions. (John Murray.
68.) —We wonder where this "Far Riding" is supposed to be. Some- where in the mountain region of Northern England., we gather from the description of the country. But then the flora is not a little strange. Can the daleamen have boughs of apple-blossom wherewith to decorate the maypole on May Day, and white hawthorn, which we in the South often have to wait for till quite late in the month, and white violets and white lilac, which do not commonly come together? Then there is a village priest who ex- communicates with bell, book, and candle, the aggrieved parishioner thinking of writing to the Archbishop of York. We are inclined to believe that this is " no-man's-land,"—and a good thing too, for anything more dreary and dismal than the life here described cannot be imagined. There is scarcely a single breath of what is sweet and wholesome from one end of the book to the other. The only excuse for such writing is that it is severely truthful ; but when a writer is manifestly incorrect in detail we cease to be interested in him. These men and women are the creatures of a disordered imagination, very much easier to invent, by the way, than pleasing and gracious figures. The purveyors of these ill-favoured, ill-savoured goods must not think that they are giving us something rare and difficult.
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