John Lexley's Troubles. By Charles W. Bardaley, lILA. (Chatto and
Windns.)—There is a great deal too much of this novel, and the author has only a feeble and imperfect notion of constructing a plot. Never- theless the book is very readable, rather in spits than in consequence of its story. John Lexley is a weak person, and the reader knows all about the mystery of his birth, and the concealment of his mother's Catholic convictions, from the moment the child says his" Our Father' in Latin to the indignation of Ebenezer Emlott, and the confusion of his own father, Ralph Lexley, the shadowiest of remorseful culprits. No more degrading example of how a man may be "sat upon" by a Dissenting "connection" of one of the more prominent and aggressive forms could be imagined than that presented by Ralph Lesley. The author overdraws his characteristica, and makes him rather contemptible for his feebleness than interesting through his grievances. The" chapel" politics and the social relations springing from them are cleverly enough described, but Mrs. Oliphant's Carlingford series of novels has exhausted that kind of material. It is difficult to define what the attraction of John Lezley's Troubles -consists of, yet some attraction the book certainly does possess, for one reads it through without any temptation to tarn over a page or a chapter, also without any temptation to peep at the end, pleasantly drawn on by the easy downrightness of the author's atyle,!an.d by bright, quaint digressions which are never tedious, but remind one of the devious rambling of a summer day's walk. One capital character stamps the novel with a certain originality,—it is that of Ike Curling, the sexton, turned antiquarian and genealogist.
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