The Labyrinth a Romance. By R. Murray Gilchrist. (Grant Richards.
6s.)—The Labyrinth is a book with an atmosphere of nightmare and a plot that justifies the title. The characters, mostly bizarre and some repellent, live in a mist and move in a maze. There is a blind man who brutally murders his wife; a witch who gives the murderer shelter for money, and finally gives him up for money also ; a baggage of a girl who makes a masquerading flight with him, provokes his anger, and is in danger of being belaboured to death, when she is rescued by Lord Welton, the profligate fine-gentleman hero of the story. Leah is established as the mistress of Lord Welton, to the affront of Fybella, the beautiful girl he is engaged to marry. In the end Fybella, unable to cure herself of her love for Welton, seeks release in death by way of a desperate ride—and Lord Welton goes mad. Other strange characters are a leper, who is faithfully nursed by a heroic sister; a priest with a wife who lives close by, and thinks her husband is seeking great fortunes in foreign lands ; and, finally, there is Judith Swarthmoor, the daughter of the priest, who ends by being happily married to the only almost normal person in the book. It is all fantastic beyond description, but the morbid extravagance of the plot is in a measure redeemed by the skill of the literary treatment.
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