Mr. J. Percy Groves may now be described as a
veteran in story- telling, and The Duke's Own (Griffith, Ferran, and Co.) is as clever a book as he has ever written. Bat he has committed one mistake in it; he has endeavoured to make it too comprehensive. Ireland in the days of Humbert's " invasion " no doubt does furnish materials for a good story, and so does the siege of Seringapatam. Bat, on the whole, Ireland and India and sensational adventures by sea constitute rather a surfeit for a single volume ; and, in consequence, Mr. Groves's plot seems occasionally somewhat spasmodic. At the same time, Peter Daly, Mr. Groves's Irish hero, is an admirably drawn character, though hie brogue is perhaps a trifle too Milesian. On the whole, however, Dr. Dennis Mulrooney strikes us as more genuinely and yet, at the same time, not so painf ally Hibernian. (By-the-way, Mr. Groves really ought not to have reproduced each a stale old pan as "Murphy" for "Morpheus.") The last agony of Tippoo Sahib is well told ; and at least two historical characters, Colonels Lally and Wellesley, look as if they had been drawn from history. The Duke's Own, alike in its strength and in its weaknesses, soggests to us the possibility that Mr. Groves is, ao to speak, "growing out" of story- telling for boys, and might do worse than devote himself to adult fiction. His Kathleen Daly would have looked very pretty in a book of the kind we mean.
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