Robert Urquhart. By Gabriel Setoun. (Bliss, Sande, and Foster.)—This is
the most ambitions work that has yet been attempted by that very capable member of the Scottish school of fiction who in his " Barncraig " and " Sunshine and Haar " has very skilfully reproduced a certain portion of Fifeshire scenery, and certain aspects of Fifeehire life. Formerly he contented himself with studies and sketches ; here he essays a story with a regular plan of construction and orthodox love-affair. He has achieved a very fair amount of success, and that because he has been contented with simplicity, both of plot and of character. His hero is a young Scotch teacher, who, belonging to a little Edinburgh clique of dabblers in literature and art, drifts, after a series of amatory and other adventures in connection with the country schoolmastering situation which he accepts, into connection with London journalism. Happily, perhaps, Mr." Gabriel Setoun" does not inflict any pictures of newspaper life upon his readers, but con- tents himself with the various " incidents"—if they can really be so styled— of Robert Urquhart's career in Kingkelvie, where he meets with his fate in the person of a certain clever and spirited Elsie. Elsie has a " past "—or rather her mother has—in which a sanctimonious Boanerges figures with little credit to himself. And then, almost as a matter of course, Urquhart has an opponent in the person of a rough farmer, who is a member of the School Board under which he serves, and whom he has to knock down because the brute makes a vile attack on Elsie's good name. All this is lively, and the bulk of it is not unnatural. But the true interest of the story centres in the minor but thoroughly Scotch characters whose acquaintanceship Urqu- hart makes in Kingkelvie, more particularly the very humble but also noble-minded and, when need arises, sternly resolute Watty Spence and Rob Buchan. Watty's denunciation of the minister who has wronged Elsie's mother is very effective, and there is both humour and pathos in the efforts of Reb to keep from Michael Downie, and still more his dying wife Marget, the knowledge that their son Rob, who is in Edinburgh, is a ne'er-do- weel and drunkard—though fortunately, as events turn out, not absolutely irreclaimable. Altogether, Robert Urquhart is one of the best and most real Scotch stories that have been published for a long time.
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