The Sport of Chance. By William Sharp. 3 vols. (Hurst
and Blackett.)—Mr. Sharp has invented for his novel a villain whose irre- pressible wickedness reminds us of the career of that monster of crime, Polichinello. The way in which Mr. Charles Leith, or Mr. Charles Edward Cameron, as he ought to be called, again and again reappears, as bold, as wicked, and as fascinating as ever, unharmed by dangers, and even triumphant over time, brings vividly before us the hunchbacked hero of the puppet-shows, as he springs up again with an uninjured head after a shower of seemingly fatal blows. We see him, for instance, in Vol. IL, p. 94, in a shipwreck scene, "as he crouched close to the gunwale of the boat, shivering and cowering like a trapped wolf." The man whom he has wronged springs at him, and would have killed him, had not one of the sailors "crashed down upon his head one of the heavy foot-spars." Mr. Sharp has now a very pretty boat's crew,—the villain, his pursuer, a madman, the mate, and three seamen. One of the seamen hurls a spar at the mate. "There was a wild struggle, and the man fell dead, stabbed to the heart." The other two attack the mate, and one of them falls overboard and is drowned. No. 3 is going to devour the body of No. 1, when the mate throws it overboard. There is another fierce struggle, in which the mate is badly wounded. Then a shark appears upon the scene ; sailor No. 3 drinks salt water, and leaps overboard in his madness. "For one brief moment a pair of writhing arms waved frantically above the surface." Then the mate dies. Then occurs this strange phenomenon :—" For leagues and leagues the sea seemed to have given up its dead. In all directions were flying
figures, wretched souls in torment waving frantic arms the ocean became a sea of molten metal wherein writhed agonising souls they were in the midst of a saturnalia of the drowned of all time, a gathering together of those untimely perished, writhing in endless woe, and cursing God and the mothers who bore them." If Mr. Sharp thinks that there is any art in these "lawless and uncertain" thoughts, he is much mistaken. His novel is nothing but an expansion to the three-volumed form of what is commonly called the "shilling shocker." It is curious that the author should not know that a banker is liable for the payment of a forged cheque.
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