NOVELS OF THE WEEK'

MR. NEIL Mules°, who achieved a remarkable success in his John Splendid—that brilliant and engaging Scots_ Cyrano de Bergerac—has shown himself no less skilled an interpreter of the visionary aspect of the Highland temperament in Gilian the Dreamer. The little orphan lad whose fortunes are traced in these fascinating pages was one of those who are affected " by the seasons, by the morning and the night, the smells of things, the sounds of woods and the splash of waters, and the mists streaming along the ravine." His whole being was "fired by sudden outer influences," and "from so trivial a thing as a cast-off horseshoe on the highway be was compelled to picture the rider, and set him upon his saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin's Court that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter's tale." There you have the nature of the hero in a nutshell; poetic, as sus- ceptible to all external influences as an 2Eolian harp, to whom the make-believe was always more vivid and true than the real, perpetually identifying himself with the creatures of his imagination, and thereby doomed to knock his head and bruise his heart against the stone walls of his environment. In early childhood he lived on a farm in the glens, but on the death of his grandmother he is adopted by an old paymaster who lives in the neighbouring town with his two bachelor brothers— veterans of the Peninsula—and an unmarried sister, the only person in the story who understands his character. The pay- master—a " clerk-soger," satirically dubbed "Old Mars" by a local wit—whose motive in adopting the fatherless orphan is never folly explained, but only hinted at, while anxious to make a soldier of the boy, is constantly disappointed by his lack of grit ; the dominie—while recognising his gifts—can make nothing of so irregular a scholar, and it is the fate of the boy himself to fall beneath the spell of Nan Turner, a young siren whose mother had in turn befooled both of the paymaster's brothers,—the General and the " Cornal." Gilian's infatuation for Nan brings the dreamer into rivalry with the man of action in the shape of young Islay, a dashing young soldier, and, while the issue is a foregone con- clusion, Gilian's humiliation is aggravated by his being beguiled into playing the role of principal in a mock elope- ment. And yet Gilian, for all his failures, is a most engaging figure who retains the sympathy of the reader to the last. What is more, Mr. Munro has mitigated the sense of pity which Gilian inspires by allowing him the prospective consola- tion of teaching in song what he has learned in suffering. The three soldier brothers and their sister Mary—the "strange little woman with the foolish Gaelic notion that an affection bluntly displayed to its object is an affection discreditable "—are all admirably drawn, and at least three of the chapters in the book—the nocturne entitled "The Sound of the Drum," describing the arrival by night of a corps from the North ; the eerie tale told by Black Duncan, the [;kipper of the ' Jean,' of his desperate battle with the grim presence in the wood; and the scene in church where Gilian fancies he hears Nan singing—are of an imaginative quality so rare and sti n- lating as to provide even a jaded novel reviewer with a new sensation. In point of style we have no hesitation in pro- nouncing Mr. Munro to have more individuality and dis- tinction than any Scottish novelist now living, and to approach nearer than any of his compeers to the grace and audacity of Stevenson.

Although The Jamesons is unquestionably concerned with a raid—as the name suggests—the scene is not laid in South Africa, but in New England. Here, again, we have no " heroes ": dux femina facti, the central figure being that of an emancipated New Yorker, the math-ease femme of a meek and unsuccessful merchant, who descends with her family on an old-fashioned village which has never taken in boarders before, and proceeds to regulate, reorganise, and revolutionise its ideas on hygiene, cookery, dress, decora- • (1.) Gilian the Dreamer. By Nell Munro. Landon : Isbister and Co. [64.] —(2.) The Jamesons. By Mary E. Wilkins. London : J. 34. Dent and Co. [2s. sal —(3.) A Plaster Saint. By Annie Edwardes. London : Ohatto and Windna. (3s. 6d.] —.KS.) Further Adventures of Captain. Kettle. By Cutellire Hyne. London : C. A. Pearson. [6s.]—(5.) The Redress of the Season. By Sir William Magnay, Bart. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. [6s.]—(3.) Selreuts• Manager. By Mrs. Ormiston Chant. London : Grant Richards. les.]—(7.) The Red Rag of Rlacil. By George Cusack. London : P. Warne and Co. Del —03.) Anna Marsden's Experiment. By Ellen Williams. London : Greening and Co. [2s.. 6d.)—(9.) The Well Sinkers. By Ethel Quinn. " Overseas Library," No. -L London : T. Fisher 1:myna. [28.]—(1.0.) A Gentleman Player. By R. N. Stephens. London : Methuen and Co. [6s.]—(11.) The House by the Lock. By Sirs. C. N. Williamson. London : James Bowden. [Ss.]

tion, gardening, and literature. The humours of such a situation are rather obvious, but Miss Wilkins invests them with the delicate quality which marks all her work, and the vagaries of the strong-minded woman with a weak digestion —she lives almost exclusively on hygienic biscuits, and carries on a fierce crusade against cakes, pastry, and pies—are genuinely diverting. Mrs. Jameson is not a caricature: such reformers exist on this as well as on the other side of the Atlantic, and on the whole in real life they afford quite as much amusement as exasperation. Not content with reading aloud Browning at the village " sewing circle," Mrs. Jameson seeks to introduce Ibsen and Maeterlinck to the ken of her neighbours, thereby exposing herself to the admirable criti- cism of Miss Flora Clark, the president of the village literary society :—

"' It is better for us all to eat bread-and-butter and pie than for two or three of us to eat olives and caviare, and the rest to have to sit gnawing their spoons.' Mrs. Peter Jones, who is sometimes thought of for the President instead of Flora, bridled a little. ' I suppose you think these books are above the ladies of this village,' said she. 'I don't know that I think they are so much above us as too far to one side,' said Flora. Sometimes it's longitude, and sometimes its latitude that separates people. I don't know but we are just as far from Ibsen and Maeterlinck as they are from us.' " After experimenting, with ludicrous results, on the livestock of the neighbourhood—the episode of shoeing the poultry is delicious—Mrs. Jameson determines to beautify the houses of the village by planting vines against their walls, and sets to work with a " calm insolence of benevolence" that is quite inimitable. Interwoven with the humorous narrative of Mrs. Jameson's eccentricities there is a slender thread of romance, her pretty daughter having lost her heart to the handsome son of the house where the Jamesons board. The course of their courtship runs far from smoothly, since Harry Lis..om's mother conceives a great contempt for the feckless " intellectuals," but the barrier is suddenly swept away in a moment of peril ; Mrs. Liscom saves the girl from being burned to death, and straightway takes her to her heart. Whereon a village oracle shrewdly remarks, "Some women can't love anybody except their own very much unless they can do something for them." Altogether this is a delightful

little book, abounding by turns in humorous, tender, and shrewd sayings.

In A Plaster Saint we are transported from the sweet simplicities of rural life as depicted by Miss Wilkins, to an atmosphere of clandestine flirtation, mundane intrigue, and sophistication generally. The Reverend George Gervase, a popular preacher of engaging exterior, carries his philander- ing propensities to extreme lengths merely to obtain " copy " for his sermons, and the story, such as it is, relates to the enlightenment of his latest flame, Miss Polly Erne, by a previous victim, Mrs. Copley Friars. Miss Erne—young, handsome, and full of the joie de vivre—refuses an eligible, if unattractive, parti, only to be thrown over by Gervase

—who had made love to her incognito—and becomes a Sister of the Poor. Gervase marries a hideous Bishop's daughter, and Mrs. Copley Friars, the " hectic woman, thin to emaciation, with insolent, miserable, blue eyes set darkly, and a death's head smile "—a very cleverly sketched, but most unpleasant, character—dies of consump- tion in Switzerland. The story is presumably intended as a satire on social hypocrisy, and is smartly, at times daringly,

written ; but Mrs. Edwardes must have but a poor opinion of her sex if she thinks that so wideawake a person as her

heroine could have been imposed on by that fishlike prig, the Reverend George Gervase.

The public, clamouring for farther tidings of Captain Kettle, has happily got a delightful volume of new West Coast and sea yarns from Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne. On the whole, we are inclined to rank the second series above the first, for the character of the resolute, reckless, psalm-composing little captain is even better delineated than before. " A Quick Way with Rebels" is perhaps the best episode in the book,

though "The New Republic" runs it close. Quiet people will have no desire to start for the West Coast after reading the Further Adventures of Captain Kettle, but all the boys who devour it will want to be off next day.

Sir William Magnay gives us in The Heiress of the Season decidedly amusing politico-social comedy. His method

recalls that of Trollope, with modern modifications, and the plot is well constructed, though the betrayal of Government secrets is a motive somewhat in danger of being over- exploited at present. The book is, of course, " of the streets streety," the characters are most of them singularly un- pleasant, and society is represented as in the decadent state generally depicted in society novels and Pinerotie plays. But the vigour and vivacity of the author's method neutralise these drawbacks to a considerable extent.

The hero of Mrs. Ormiston Chant's novel, Sellcuts' Manager was by no means a commonplace person. The son of a Devonshire farmer, he raises himself (before the beginning of the story) to a position of great wealth by building music-halls and theatres, all conducted for the moral advancement of the million. He is very handsome, perfectly virtuous, and ex- quisitely dressed ; in short he has no faults, and owns his impeccability without disguise. The plot of the novel revolves round this admirable figure, and the scenes are enacted in country houses, prisons, hospitals, and prisons. The story may be not unfairly described as a novel with a great many purposes — prison reform, temperance, pure amusement, religions tolerance, &c.—and though loosely constructed, is quite readable and intermittently amusing.

The Red Rag of Ritual is hardly as impressive as its fine alliterative title. The germ of a good idea is discernible in the character of the Anglican priest, whose motives for secession vacillate between honest doubt and love of comfort, but its development is disappointing, and the same remark applies to the whole book,—the themes are promising, but the working- out crude and ineffectual.

Anna Marsden's Experiment recounts the adventures of an ugly woman journalist who thought that life would look more lively through masculine eyes. Her travestissernent is so successful that no one recognises her, and she is thus enabled to share the lodgings of the man whom she loves, but who loves another. Her chum secures her a place on the staff of the paper to which he is attached, and she finds that a manly mode of expression comes much more easily to her than a feminine style. Unhappily, the other young lady proving obdurate, the chum dies of consumption, whereon Anna, her ambition slain by adverse fortune, resumes the garb, and pre- sumably the style, of her sex. This is a story which can only be accepted on the credo quia absurdum principle.

The Well Sinkers is a depressing little Australian tale in which the characters are relentlessly pursued by drought, disaster, and death. The descriptions of the dreary scenery are well done, and the book is certainly calculated to deter any reader from visiting the western division of New South Wales, in which the scene is laid.

Mr. Stephens's A Gentleman Player has not Mr. W. G. Grace for its hero, but an actor of good birth who undertakes a secret mission on behalf of Queen Elizabeth. The narrative is stirring enough in its way, but the opening chapter, which aims at nothing lees than a detailed account of the first performance of Hamlet, does more credit to the author's courage than his discretion. Only a giant can wear the giant's robe.

The House by the Lock is a signal proof of the tyranny of success, Mrs. Williamson, who has really a genuine gift for light comedy, being compelled by the inexorable clamour of a public avid of sensationalism to devote her talents to the delineation of exorbitant crime and extravagant horror. In her new book we find an adorable heroine of surpassing love- liness blackmailed into a loveless marriage with the villain of the plot to shield her brother from a false charge of marder,— one of the many committed by the villain himself. The story, which opens with a dreadful dream of a dead man's hand, followed by the discovery of a headless corpse and the successful impersonation of the victim by a tool of the villain's, ends with a tardy tribute to poetic justice. We note that the device by which Carson Wildred trans- mogrifies his physiognomy has already done duty in a previous story by the author.

We owe Mr. Bernard Capes an apology for taking him to task for his spelling of Liege as Liege. A correspondent writes to point out that the best French authorities adopt the latter form.