Gleneairn. By Iza Duffus Hardy. 3 vols. (Hurst and Blaokett.)--
Glencairn is a painful story, not without talent, but certainly not written with that commanding power which is especially necessary f r tales which must succeed by extorting rather than attracting admira- tion. There is a certain boldness and originality about the character of Glencairn himself, or we should rather say, about the conception of his personality. There is a strange mystery about him when he appears upon the scene. He is a foundling, the survivor of a shipwreck, whose birth and parentage are unknown. And his end snits his beginning, for when he finds that his hopes and schemes are disappointed, and that the crime with which he had sought to subserve them is fruit- less, he disappears more mysteriously than he came. There is -some- thing weird and powerful about this imagination, but the rest of the tale is not up to the same level. Is there not an anachronism in making a middle-aged man acquire a fortune in his youth in the Diamond Fields of the Cape ?
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