NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* Titottoll Mr. Qraat Allen has descended
from his " hill-top " in 4(iss caylo's Adventures, we are unregenerate enough to hold that no exercise of the art of sinking is involved in this loss of altitude. As a serious preacher we find him intoler- ably frigid, and in all respects deserving of the castigation he once received at the hands of Mrs. Oliphant. (Row delight- ful was that caustic comparison of the "hill-top" to a certain " lesser mount " of malodorous associations 0 But as an irre- sponsible yarn-spinner Mr. Grant Allen is, in our humble opinion, a formidable rival to the most audacious sensa- tionalists of the sixpenny magazines. In the volume before us he frankly abandons all effort to reorganise the decalogae, and confines his energies exclusively to the invention of entertaining or exciting incidents. Lois Cayley, the orphan daughter of an Army officer, suddenly reduced to beggary at the conclusion of her career at Girton, resolves to adopt the career of an adventuress pour le bon motif: An opportune act of eavesdropping in the Park secures her an engagement as travel- ling companion to a cantankerous but really kind-hearted old lady of rank. On their journey to Sehlangenbad Lois outwits a sharper who endeavours to relieve Lady Georgina of her jewel-case, thereby winning the heartfelt gratitude of her patroness, and further confirms this good opinion by heroically refusing the suit of her nephew, a handsome and opulent Attach6, on the ground of herlovrn poverty. To complete this act of self-sacrifice, worthy of a novelist of the mid-Victorian epoch, Lois quits Lady Georgina and goes in quest of fresh adventures. The chapters which relate her strange partnership with the bicycle inventor form an excellent contrast to the sentimental passages which precede and follow them. Even- tually, after shooting tigers in India and saving the Attaches life, when he had fallen over a precipice, she rescues him from a nefarious plot to ruin him by a false charge of forgery, and, the conditions being thus fulfilled which she had insisted on at the time of her previous refusal—viz., that she would never marry him until he was poor and deserted—revises the verdict in his favour. We wonder what terrible literary penance Mr. Grant Allen will enjoin on himself for this uncompromising conces- sion to conventional sentiment and orthodox morality.
While guided in style and outlook by other conflicting influences, the joint-authors of Adrian Rome have shown themselves in regard to nomenclature and externals faithful disciples of the Disraelitish manner. Adrian Rome, Marion Brabant, Mrs. Vesper, Lord Henry Minaret,—such names are worthy of the sumptuous imagination of the author of Lothair ; while the description of Adrian's semi-Oriental physiognomy, and the atmosphere of his rooms at St. Cyr's College, Oxford, recall those characteristic exuberances which were travestied in Thackeray's Codlingsby. Thus in one scene a young under- graduate, after drinking Maraschino out of a tall Venetian glass, departs with Stendhal's Chartreuse under his arm, a collocation which is decidedly, if unintentionally, humorous. Shorn of its decorative trappings and subtleties of expression, the story is, to put it baldly, rather thin. Adrian Rome, the rich ward of the cynical, but supremely elegant, Lord Hilde- brand, has for his chief playmate in childhood and boyhood a beautiful girl of humble parentage but great natural dis- tinction. Re recognises her charm and goodness at their full worth, yet so far yields to the worldly influence and warnings of his guardian and of his cousin, Lord Henry Minaret, as to let the prize slip from his grasp, and contract a loveless marriage with the statuesque Miss Marion Brabant. He achieves a certain position as a poet and dramatist, but these triumphs fail to fill the void in his life, and meeting Sylvia, his early love, who has gone on the stage, he falls so far beneath her spell as to propose an elopement, after having provoked the not unnatural jealousy of his wife. Sylvia rejects his proposals, and Adrian shortly after is drowned in a boating accident. The artificiality of the plot, in which no single incident has • (1.) Miss Cayley's Adventures. By Grant Mien. With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. London : Grant Richards. [6s.)—.r(2) Adrian Rome. By Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore. London: Methuen and Co. [C3.]—..—(5.) The Common Lot. By Adeline Sergeant. London : Andrew Melrose. [Ss. 6d.]—(4.) The Adven- turesof Captain Horn. By Prank R. Stockton. London : Cassell and Co. Ds. 6ti.] ) The Waters of Caney Ford. By °pie Read. London: (noes and CO. [Be.] —(S.) The Romance of Ettsavet. By Mrs. W. M. Ramsay. London : Hodder and Stcsaghtoa Iris the Avenger. By Florence Marryat. London : Hutchinson and Co. [Gs.]—(8.) The Man Between. By Robert Halifax. London : Grant Richards. [6s.]—(9.) The Faith that IttUs. By Muerte Hahne. Beaman. London : Hurst and Blackett. (6s.]...--(1o.) A Son of the Sea. By John Arthur Barry. London : Duckworth and Co. [ss.] the quality of inevitableness, is accentuated by the affectations of the authors' style, which may be illustrated by a single quotation from the passage in which Sylvia is introduced to the reader for the first time :—" When presently she changed her position, and gently flushed into consciousness of the in- truder, the face which she turned to him—one was reminded by it instinctively of rosebuds, or the dew-drenched morning --was net the less charming because of its infantile roundness, a suggestion of immaturity corroborated by the slim lines of her figure. It made her beauty (for the girl was beautif;il,- one gave her advisedly the historic epithet) a thing rather of promise than of fulfilment."
Miss Adeline Sergeant has temp9mrily emancipated herself from the thraldom of melodrama in The Common ziot. Ursula Keane, the eldest daughter of a stockbroker who dies suddenly on the eve of bankruptcy, devotes her small income to providing for the needs of her stepmother, an ungrateful malade imaginaire, and a troop of stepbrothers and step- sisters. In the course of her new life she is brought into contact and conflict with James Brandon, a fiery-tempered but high-minded doctor, and ultimately marries him. The elopement of her sister Sylvia promises a sensational climax, but the detrimental young man is finally disposed of by an opportune railway accident. The story lacks the alert movement of most of Miss Sergeant's books, and Ursula, though a capable and courageous young woman, is too aggressively conscientious to inspire affection.—Mr. Frank Stockton, whose name is generally a guarantee for good entertainment, does not belie his reputation in The Adven- tures of Captain Horn, a tale concerned with the buried treasures of the Incas. Most pages convey a "thrill," and again and again the reader is moved to ejaculate : " Well, I can't see how they are going to get out of that." In the end captain Horn, who is a perfect epitome of bravery, honesty, gallantry, and excellent business sense, re-marries the lady, Edna Markham, whom he married for business reasons before quitting the scene of the shipwreck, where he leaves her to guard the treasure. This business marriage, it should be added, is conducted by a sable gentleman who is a priest at home. All the shipwrecked company return with huge fortunes to New York, and there is a generally comfortable, warm feeling of extreme wealth about the end of the book. —The Waters of Caney Ford is a neutral-tinted, but eminently readable story of still life in Tennessee. The interest of the book resides in the picture which it gives of the place and the people, and the quietly humorous farmer, with his spiritual difficulty in feeling (till after a serious illness) that he is "one of the elect," is very happily drawn. The story is told by a young doctor, who, after drifting west- ward, returns to take up his father's practice in Tennessee. —Mrs. W. M. Ramsay has turned her travels in Asia Minor to good account in The Romance of Elisavet, a story, by turns grim and graceful, of a young servant girl living near Smyrna, and possessed by an intense desire of money and amusement. Her lover Panayotti, a seller of goats' milk, in an evil hour is persuaded to turn brigand in order to gratify Elisavet's ambition, and from having lost his heart he comes, in a literal sense, to lose his head. The scenes of brigandage are vividly described.—Iris the Avenger is very much on a level with Miss Marryat's previous efforts ; that is to say, it is slight in texture, but briskly and fluently told. Virtue is richly rewarded at the close, when Iris Bevan, governess, actress, and typist, marries an Earl on whom she had resolved to wreak vengeance for the betrayal of her sister. Luckily for her prospects of entering the Peerage, the incriminated Earl turns out to be only the friend of the betrayer, and to have saved the situation and rescued the deserted sister from starvation. One must add that "the long arm of coincidence" has seldom been stretched to greater length than in these pages.—The style of The Man Between is so involved and allusive as to render its perusal little short of a penance. The same remark applies to The Faith that Kills, a work which seldom deviates from the paths of indecorous insipidity.— Mr. Barry gives us in A Son of the Sea a vigorous tale of the adventures of a " gentleman-midshipman " in the merchant service. In regard to sentiment the book is rather con- ventional, but the life on ship-board and amongst the cannibal blacks in Australia is treated with a realism of which the readers of W. H, Kingston and the " brava Ballantyne" were perhaps blissfully ignorant.
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