18 OCTOBER 1890, Page 25

The Mysterious Stranger. By C. H. Thorburn. (Digby and

Long.)—It must require a certain amount of courage to publish an absurdity of this sort—courage, however, which deserves no reward. The ignorance of everything that goes to make up social existence, the almost colossal ignorance of the fitness of things that it betrays, is something very painful. The want of taste, the chalky sentiment, the complete absence of the faintest literary perception, and the fatuity and emptiness of even the dialogue, is, to quote a favourite phrase of the writer, "never to be forgotten." To quote some of the blunders would be to hold the writer up to endless ridicule, a revenge too severe even for an enraged reviewer.