Henry Ancrum : a Tale of the Last War in
New Zealand. By "J. H. K. 2 vols. (Tinsley.)—We must own to having but a moderate liking for books of this kind, which, for the most part, are neither good novels, nor good histories. " J. H. K.," it is quite evident, knows his subject, and might, we should say, have written a good book, but he does not know bow to write a novel. It is quite possible—for publishers, if not authors, may be supposed to know their business—that there is a public foz whose taste all sorts of useful information must be " sugar-coated " with
fiction ; yet we can hardly imagine a reader so novel-mad as to think that Henry Ancrwn is improved by the covering of fiction that it has been thought well to give it. Of course, there has to be a villain, and he is as great a monstrosity as we have ever seen ; and there is a girl, for whom wo are expected to feel some some sort of sympathy, but who is base enough—and a lower depth of baseness can
hardly be imagined—to father her child upon an innocent man. And there is the hero, a shadowy sort of person, very brave and moderately faithful. We cannot help thinking what a very superior book might have been made, if all attempt at constructing the
conventional plot which a novel is expected to have had been avoided, if the hero's adventures with the Maoris had been told in a plain, straight-
forward narrative, without any of the tedious entanglements of love and hatred with which it has been thought expedient to complicate it. One advantage of no small weight, from the artistic point of view, would have
been that the episode of the Maori girl might have been made into a
really fine feature of the story. No one cares a scrap about the young lady to whom Henry Ancrum is engaged, but her existence makes us read the story of the Maori girl's love with less satisfaction. Let "J. H. K."
re-write his book in one volume, plunge the hero in medias res, and cut out every syllable about Ancrum Hall, and his cousin, and his love-mak- ing, and all the rest of the conventional business of novel-writing. Other people can do this better than he, but he does know something about• New Zealand, and has some idea of saying it.
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