The Gates of Dawn. By Fergus Hume. (Sampson Low and
Co.)—Mr. Fergus Hume's latest story is so very old-fashioned that it has some of the novelty of antiquity. The young peer who travels about the country in a caravan in the attire of a game- keeper is, perhaps, partly of to-day ; but the gipsies and the prophecies, and the Elizabethan portrait at the hall which bears such a striking resemblance to the vagrant, and the mysterious occupant of the said hall, who is somehow connected with the gipsies, and with the equally mysterious laudanum-drinking doctor, all belong to the romantic melodrama of fifty years ago. In these days of sombre conscientious realism, there is something exhilarating even in the wild improbabilities of The Gates of Dawn, which in one respect may be compared to Shelley's poetry, for it certainly "emancipated us from the tyranny of the actual." There is, moreover, a fine breeze of fresh wholesome air blowing through the book ; and good Vicar Jarner, the uncouth sporting parson, is a capital specimen of a type which by this time is probably extinct. One gets the impression that Mr. Hume enjoyed the writing of the book, and perhaps this is the reason that we have not failed of enjoyment in the reading of it.
Previous page
