The Deliverance. By Ellen Glasgow. (A. Constable and Co. 6s.)—This
" romance of the Virginian tobacco-fields " is an effective piece of work, though there are, it seems to us, some flaws in it. We do not quite see, for instance, how the wise and serene Maria of the latter part of the story can be the same person as the Maria, who is not specially wise or serene, of the former. But about Christopher Blake, a Virginian aristocrat, who has to pay for the omissions and commissions of many genera- tions of easy-going ancestors, there can be no mistake. Few more striking figures have been drawn in American fiction. Nor could we have anything more genuinely pathetic than the old mother, still surrounded with the fiction of a splendour that had passed away. What a scene is that when, in her last hours, she takes a stately farewell—she is blind, it must be remembered—of a household which had ceased to exist. And then there is poor Cynthia, so used to lying—she had had to keep up her mother's delusions—that she was fairly lost when the necessity had ceased. The Deliverance is a fine story.
C URRENT LITERAT URE.
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