John Loll'a Alice. By Frances G. Barmester. (Grant Richards. 6s.)—As
no list of other novels follows Miss or Mrs. Burmester's name on the title-page, we are probably right in considering John Lolt's Alice to be a first novel. It has, perhaps, one fault of a first book, in that the author really suffers from not being able to get in all she wishes to say, and consequently produces a rather congested effect, very different from the attenuated proportions of a book whose writer has already addressed the public six or seven times. Another beginner's fault is that Miss Burmester adopts a slightly patronising tone both to her characters and readers, accentuated through her airing of her own views by the bold use of the pronoun "I" ("that upright and independent vowel" as Thackeray calls it). Notwithstanding both these faults, there is a great deal of excellent material in the book, the character- drawing is in some instances most successful, and the Author
knows her Essex down to the last ditch in the last marsh. Alice herself, with her gipsy blood and her fierce temper, only softened when she can indulge her love for a child of her very own, is a most striking figure, though the present writer must confess to not sharing the author's obvious affection for her. Still, the woman is no shadow, and with her necklace of great smooth rose-pink coral beads we can picture her as vividly as though we bad really seen her, gazing across the fiat land from her cottage doorway. Altogether this is not a book to be overlooked. It has faults, but, ;again, it is any- thing but colourless, though perhaps when the author has rather less to say she will, paradoxically enough, give us a book even better worth reading.
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