Lynton Grange. A Novel. By I. R. S. Harington. 1
vol. (Pitman.) —We sustained our first shock in reading this story when we were in- formed that a poacher had received a pardon from the Crown before he was convicted of any offence, or even tried. Shock number two perhaps we deserved for looking surreptitiously at the denouement; at all events, we were astounded by what we learnt there in relation to the weakness- of the villain, and quite lost any interest that we might otherwise have felt in him. A man who, intending to deceive a woman by means of is mock marriage, is induced by a third person to go into a church and sign his name in the parish register in the presence of the parish clerk, is reallyso stupid as not to be justified in departing from the conventional path of honesty and virtue. It may be that after this discovery we had got into a state of undue sensitiveness, but it certainly seems to us that we received a series of shocks ; that the incidents were improbable, the motives of the characters inscrutable, and the changes of conduct incomprehensible. And we came to the conclusion that unless a mur- der and a mad woman are enough alone to float a novel, the book before us has but a poor prospect of prolonged existence.
Previous page
