The latest volume of Messrs. Fisher Urrwin's " First Novel
Library " possesses in a high degree both the faults and the freshness of a young author's first adventure. There is a very serious ideal at the back of Mr. Ronald Fraser's mind, but this accords but ill with the comedy with which the novel opens. Albert Codling, a draper in his lighter moments, is really a Super-Man, and as such, against all physical laws, makes wingless flights about the world at his pleasure. Mr. Fraser has humour and, as said above, ideals, but he mixes these elements with so inexperienced a hand that instead, as is his intention, of the humour reinforcing the ideals, it works against them. Far be it from us in these columns to discourage the fiction of fantasy ; but that is a very different thing from the fiction of absurdity.
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