The Straits of Poverty. By Ella Maomahon. (Chapman and Hall.
6s.)—Though Miss Macmahon calls her book The Straits of Poverty, she very quickly delivers her hero from these uncomfortable narrows. The book indeed is a study in success, and the portrait of the principal personages is specially able. The author does not shrink from exposing the defects of her hero,. Ernest Flint, and one of these defects is of a kind which is sup- posed to be particularly unheroic, for there is no denying the fact that he has a touch of rather blatant vulgarity. In spite of this, however, he is an attractive creature, and the reader will quite sympathise with the devotion which his high-minded wife Margery feels for him, even in his most flamboyant moments. The- minor figures of the book are well drawn, but Flint dominates them so entirely that they merely serve as a necessary background to his achievements. No doubt in the last chapter, at a time when he is unusually successful, Ernest Flint has a moment of discouragement, in which he feels the vanity of human achieve- ments, yet in spite of this the reader will leave him with a happy feeling that this phase of depression will not last long. The new peer, indeed—for to this giddy height have Flint's achievements raised him—will soon be quite convinced that, in spite of the eclipsing shadow which overhangs every life, everything is really for the best in a world which to the clever and energetic man is the best of all possible worlds.
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