27 MAY 1893, Page 24

Dick or the Doctor. By Rex Raynor. (Digby, Long, and

Co.)— There is plenty of humour in this Australian story, but the characters are over-drawn, and much that otherwise would have amused us is too obviously forced. The conversation between two young rakes at the beginning is inordinately drawn out, and is very poor stuff as well. Surely it is unadvisable to run the risk of boring the reader thus early in the story ; for no

-writer can invest such a dialogue with genuine interest. Dick or the Doctor is one of those productions that would have been good had its author boiled down its four hundred pages to a third of that number.