Good Cheer. The Christmas Number of Good Words. (Strahan and
Co.)—Gideon's Rock is a tale of considerable power and pathos, which no one can commence without reading to its (somewhat unnatural and melodramatic) close. The story hangs on an act of treachery com- mitted by one brother in a fit of jealousy for another. They are both smugglers in the times when smuggling in England was called free- trade, and did to some extent remedy the external evils of a grossly abused restrictive system. Gideon Weir informs of his brother, Andrew Weir, in a moment of sudden and intense jealousy, and is troated in consequence by his own family and all the neighbourhood as worse than a leper. The power of the story consists in the intensity with which this poor man's frightful loneliness is painted, the moral dangers it causes him, and the moral discipline it gives. This is told with very great power. But the characters are not sketched with equal power, and here and there is a touch of senti- mentalism which develops in the denouement into melodrama. Not the less, the tale is really a genuine Christmas number of Good Werds,— a Christmas number in no namby-pamby or sentimental sense. We have no idea who the author may be, but he Cr she should produce more perfect things at some future day.
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