The Common Ancestor. By John Hill. 3 vols. (Chatto and
Windus.)—This is a clever novel, but with what we may call some loose ends about it. The "Common Ancestor" himself makes no little demand upon our faith. The tale is of the present day; we read, for instance, of volunteer officers learning their work at the Wellington Barracks, and yet the deus ex machind, for whom, however, there is scarcely a knot that requires his untying, is an old man who is supposed to have been killed, aged twenty-five, at the Battle of Trafalgar ! And how did the soi-disant Mrs. Schenier come to mistake Andrew Cunningham for her husband? The husband was "five feet six" (Vol. I., p. 242), Cunningham was "a tall strong man" (Vol. I., p. 22). Yet in Vol. III., p. 198, she had " no doubt who the man was." He was "walking rapidly," and she could see him clearly enough to plunge a knife into his side. How was it she did not perceive that he was half a foot taller and proportionately bigger than the man whom she intended to
? But the novel is eminently readable. A brisker tale we have seldom read. Dick Scanlan and his sister Nora, Johnny Smalley and his sister Jane, are particularly good. Perhaps the best of them all is Jane Smalley, who is as clever and amusing a young person as we have met for a long time in fiction. There are some improbabilities, we cannot help thinking, in The Common. Ancestor, but there is nothing dull and nothing unwholesome.
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