Gilbert Preethorne's Heritage. By W. C. Alvary. (Sonnenschein.) —This is
a decidedly ambitious and promising, though not quite successful attempt to give us a romance of Scotch clerical life, to weave mystery, heresy, love, money, and parish gossip into a single plot. Mr. Alvary would have succeeded a great deal better than he has done, if he had been content to take Gilbert Freethorne, in his character nominally of legitimate son to Daniel Freethorne, the blacksmith, really of illegitimate son to his own elder, Mr. Abbott, and left freethinking alone. The fact, with its various subsidiary complications, involves a sufficiency of mystery for even a two-volume novel. This portion of the story is, indeed, worked out in a way which ought to give complete satisfaction to all who admire fiction of the mysterious kind. Thus, Mr. Witherton and Mr. Abbott, the two repentant evil-doers, are made to keep their secrets very skilfully almost to the end, and the characters of Elsie and Giles, who give an air at once of eeriness and of villainy to the story, are remarkably well drawn. We might, however, have been spared the politics quite as easily as the heresy, of Gilbert Freethorne's Heritage, but for a different reason. There is too little, not too much of it. There is nothing peculiarly Scotch about the tittle- tattle or the society of Briarstown, in which Gilbert Freethorne for a time figures as minister, and the reader of this book will feel inclined to doubt if Mr. Alvary has not "got up" his Northern peculiarities of character somewhat. He writes carefully, however, and if he is not heard of as a novelist in the future, it will be his own fault. Gilbert Preethorne's Heritage is much more notable for promise than for actual performance.
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