A Fight with Fortune. By Mortimer Collins. 3 vols. (Hurst
and Blackett.)—The reviewer will get tired of criticising Mr. Mortimer Collins's faults long before he gets tired of committing them. Here, for instance, we have, as usual, a great deal about eating and drinking; we feel ashamed of reviewing an old assault, but Mr. Collins goes on in serene complacency with his gourmet's talk about sirloins of beef and good things of every kind. Then, again, he has been told that his plots are extravagant. That does not hinder him from introducing us to a set a characters and incidents which, though they are amusing enough, certainly defy all sort of probability. Ho probably knows that his readers do not go to him for clever plots or subtly drawn characters. To string together as many clever things as he can manage to think of is about the sum of his ambition. Only he is apt, as men who write under such conditions are apt to do, to mistake dogmatism and per- verseness for cleverness or, rather, not to mistake them, for he knows better than that, but to make them serve the same purpose. One of the results of this is that we are often affronted by an intolerance which exhausts our patience, and by a presumption which Mr. Collins has no right to display. He is perfectly at liberty to admire Lord Byron, but he is offensive when he indulges in unworthy sneers at Mr. Tenny- son. No one, again, will quarrel with his love for Catullus, but who will not think him absurd when he calls Horace "prosaic ?"
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