NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* Mn. Percy White's Muse is a
young lady who may be best described as "of the town, towny." She is at her best when inspiring her author with lively scenes about social London, and providing him with scalpel and knife to dissect the heart of some worldly old sinner whose fortunes she desires him to follow. In his new story, The Grip of the Bookmaker, Mr. White gives us a very clever study of a retired racing man of the name of Mortimer Gordon, who, having buried Alf. Harris, the bookmaker, under the above sonorous alias, goes to live with his only son in Rutland Square. This square, like the Gate of the same name with which most Londoners are acquainted, is the abode of chill respectability, and from the solemn portals of one of its mansions Mr. Mortimer Gordon attempts to conduct a social vendetta against a certain proud Colonel. The Colonel, Madryn by name, having found out Gordon's identity with Alf. Harris, whom he had stigmatised as " a leg " thirty years before, refuses with scorn to entertain the idea of a marriage between Gordon's son and his own daughter. The story is long,—by which it is meant, not that it ever drags, but that the events described cover a considerable period of time. Divers exceedingly smart ladies play a prominent part in it, and there is a very amusing sketch of a smart woman's tea club, held in rooms over the salons of a fashionable dressmaker. Though of course not the jeune premier, which part is reserved for his son Philip, old Mortimer Gordon is the real hero of the book. His schemes for the humiliation and mortification of his enemy are, however, frustrated by the affection felt by his son for that enemy's daughter. The book is vulgar, inasmuch as it is about vulgar people, but it is both amusing and brightly written. Perhaps on the whole the adjective " sparkling " is the one that fits it best.
The moral of Miss Diiring's story, Malicious Fortune, ap pears to be that should you possess a ring wherein is set a stone which was formerly the eye of Siva, horrible things will happen to you if you wear it. Having had this proved to him all through the book, the reader will be surprised to leave the ring at the end of the story on the finger of the heroine, worn as a " keeper " to her wedding-ring. So far, the author tells us darkly, nothing has happened to disturb the heroine's happy serenity, but it seems a risky way for a woman to cure her husband of superstition. Miss During does not endow her personages with much consistency of
character. It is perfectly impossible to believe that any man with the smallest pretensions to being a gentleman would invent the mean little scheme and employ the threats whereby the hero induces the heroine to marry him. It is extremely
• (1.) The Grip of the Bookmaker. By Percy White. London : Hutchinson and Co. [Allen. 1—(3.) Marrable's Magnificent Idea. By F. C. Constable. London: W. Blackwood and Sons. [6s.]—(4.) My Lady's Diamonds. By Adeline Ser; geant. London : Ward, Lock, and Co. [Ss. 6d.]—(6.) Bush- Whacking. ow other Sketches. By Hugh Clifford, C.M.G. London : W. Blackwood and SOO& [6s.]—(6.) The Countrrr I Come from. By Henry Lawson. London Badcock. London : H. . Coates and Co. 6s. —8.) My Heart and Lula Blackwood and Bons. 6s.]—(7.) The Tower Wye. By William Sent/ Br A. St. Laurence. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [64.] difficult to sympathise with a hero who is a poltroon. Also, the author does not allow for the majesty of the offended law of Great Britain. The result of prison-breaking, for the escape orMajor Catitalid=from his wardens is practically prison-breaking, would hardly be the reduction of a prisoner's sentence, however deeply the sympathies of the public were engaged on the said prisoner's behalf. In spite of its sundry absurdities, the book will, however, be found readable by people who like a good deal of story and are not too particular about probabilities.
The only clear idea which the reader carries away from Kr. Constable's novel, Marrable's Magnificent Idea, is that although Marrable was a most dishonest man, fortune and his friends combined behind his back to turn his magnificent idea into a respectable speculation, and to deprive him of the illegitimate wealth he meant to make by " bearing " the shares of his own company. However, the company booms, and Marrable has his private consolation. Mr. Con- stable is not very happy in his descriptions of the entrance of newly made millionaires into London society, and the social festivities which he describes are " wooden " in the extreme. The character of Mr. Semple, the providence of the whole business, reminds us of that portrait of Queen Elizabeth which was painted without shadows on the face. There are no shadows in Mr. Semple's character, and his guilelessness far surpasses that of modern babes and sucklings. As a whole, the book is disappointing. The first chapter promises well, and the book is not mere froth, but has a plot which, when disentangled and quietly thought out, is shown to be ingenious. Unfortunately, however, as a whole the story is not very successful.
It might have been imagined that the modern hero was far too wary a person to be deceived by the female adventuress masquerading under compromising circumstances in the cloak of his lady-love. But Miss Sergeant thinks highly of the ingenuousness of the race, and the hero of her new story, My Lady's Diamonds, is most comfortably hoodwinked for four whole chapters by this ancient device. The compro- mising circumstances are that in a ruined castle late at night the cloaked figure is seen pouring gold, notes, and diamonds into the bands of a tall sinister stranger with a " long black moustache, which curled upwards at the points." The stranger subsequently embraces the cloaked figure warmly, and next morning "my lady's diamonds" and a good round sum of money are found to be missing. Of course in an honest melodrama of this description, the heroine is in the end com- pletely vindicated, and the diamonds are discovered by the police concealed in the back hair of the female villain, while the sinister gentleman (who has by this time shaved off his striking moustache) shoots himself upstairs rather than be taken. Once more, as in the case of many other books of the same nature, the only possible comment on the story is the immortal observation that " for those who like this kind of thing, this is just the kind of thing they like."
Bush-Whacking, and other Sketches is hardly a novel. But it comes in the novel form, and it consists of a collection of sketches—in which truth and fiction mingle —of brave lives and heroic endeavours and pathetic deaths in far corners of the earth where Englishmen are called to do their duty. And not Englishmen only. One of the most vivid, and certainly not the least interesting, of the papers gives us the portrait of a French missionary to the Chinese. The story is told with the utmost simplicity, begin- ning with the schooldays of Jean Rouellot at Dinan, and ending with his dying of cholera in the arms of the Englishman who nursed him, in the summer of 1896, at Kulila Lumut. " In the Heart of Kalamantan" describes a friendship between two men who never saw one another in the flesh, but talked together from distant places through a telephone. The rela- tion of Tom Burnaby to Gervase Fornier was none the less vital. Burnaby was a man of robust and wholesome temper; Gervase was over-sensitive, nervous, and altogether unfit to support the strain of his lonely station. But when he dis- covered that Burnaby had literally sacrificed his own life in order to remain at the other end of the telephone and keep up the courage of his weak brother, nerve came to him at last, and iti " came to stay." Gervase plays the man in the end, and the story is beautiful. All the sketches are finely touched,
and deal with the nobler and subtler aspects of human nature.
The Country I Come from is another volume of short stories, also of far-away lands. Rough scenes of bush life, full of grim and tragic reality, supply the themes. The style is terse and incisive. There is plenty of incident, and the usual contrasts of loyalty and baseness, greedy cunning and easily gulled generosity, in the men. Some of the pictures are of women ; among these " The Drover's Wife" stands out with an almost lurid effect of lonely strength and self-reliance.
Mr. Badcock's novel, The Tower of Wye, carries us back to early Virginian days. The hero, Richard Smith, who describes himself as "a Kentish lad of Old England," sails for the New World with a cargo of maidens destined to be sold to Georgian planters. They meet with every kind of adventure, natural and supernatural. The interest is well sustained, though the narrative is sometimes rather needlessly prolix. A preface explains that there are elements of fact among the circumstances of the story, as well as a sprinkling of real people among the personages.
In My Heart and Lute the hero, Jack Wentworth, starts in life with the pleasant prospects of a rich man's son. His father is a wealthy banker and an honest gentleman, his mother a silly and snobbish woman. Jack takes after his father, and shows himself true and honourable all through the story. His college career is not brilliant, except in the matter of cricket. When he leaves Oxford he enters his father's bank, and is courted by mothers and daughters. Early engaged to Agatha Weston, he never thinks of being unfaithful to her in act, though he is considerably smitten with Daisy Egerton, the niece of Cuthbert Scott, his best friend among the Oxford dons. In time there is a bank failure, and Sir John Wentworth has a paralytic stroke at the psychological moment. Great responsibilities fall on Jack, and he meets them like a hero, throwing his own fortune of ten thousand pounds into the sum with which his father's creditors are hardly met, and turning village organist to support him- self. The motive is good, and the characters are not ill-con- ceived. But everything in the book is overlaboured in a manner that entirely spoils effect. Moreover, the style is common.
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