The Bondman. By Hall Caine. 3 vols. (W. Heinemann.)— The
scene of Mr Hall Caine's story is laid partly in Iceland, partly in the Isle of Man. He warns us in his preface not to take either of these localities in too critical a spirit. They may not be exactly the Iceland or the Isle of Man of the time, but they present substantially the true features of these places as they were, we may say, a hundred years ago, more or less. The daughter of the Governor of Iceland falls in love with a young athlete who performs some marvellous feats, falls with a pre- cipitancy that seems to belong to a Juliet rather than to the more cool-blooded maidens of the North. Her father turns her out of his house; she marries the young athlete, who is little better than an idle loafer, and is abominably treated by him. He flies from the country to the Isle of Man, and there takes, or is taken by, a second wife, a disreputable creature, who amply avenges upon him the wrongs that he has himself inflicted upon the woman who had really loved him. Of each marriage a son is born. These two brothers, Jason and " Sunlocks "—for such is the name borne by the child of the Manx woman—are the heroes of the story. Jason has sworn to avenge his mother ; his father shall die, if he
meets him, or his father's son, for news of the marriage in Man has reached him. Such an oath is perhaps a little out of place.
The passions which it expresses are not by any means extinct, but they do not take this form. Here, then, are the elements of a tragedy, "as refreshing as a thunderstorm," to use Mr. Hall Caine's own expression; and there is another explosive ingredient in the fact that both the brothers love, and, indeed, in a way are loved by, one Greeba, daughter of Adam Farebrother, Deputy- Governor of Man. We shall not attempt to carry our account of this novel any further. It must suffice to say that. there is great strength in the working-out of the plot. We may wish now and then that the author had retrenched some of his inartistic details, —in the description, for instance, of the marriage-feast in the first volume. Now and then, too, the tragic tone is somewhat exaggerated, and we get fine writing which fails to be effective. But, on the whole, we may congratulate Mr. Caine on having written a tale that is truly powerful in conception and execution, and enforces a lofty moral.
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