The Spectre of the Camera I or, the Professor's Sister.
By Julian Hawthorne. (Chatto and Windus.)—We are strongly of opinion that when Mr. Julian Hawthorne takes us into the world of fantastic invention, the interest and charm of the tour are in inverse ratio to its extent. To put the matter less metaphorically, the shortest of his purely fanciful stories are also by far the best; and he has written at least a dozen short tales which we think infinitely more successful, from an artistic point of view, than the romance which is here spread over nearly two hundred and fifty pages. One strong impossibility may be accepted by the imagina- tion without sense of strain, but repeated impossibilities, quite different from each other in nature, tend to destroy the sense of illusion, especially when, as here, they are sandwiched between passages of homely realism. We may point out that the last of these things—the artificial prolongation of life in a mesmeric trance—has not even the merit of originality, being borrowed from Edgar Poe, just as the murder by disease-germs is borrowed from Mr. Grant Allen.
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