The Maid-at-Arms. By R. W. Chambers. (A. Constable and Co.
6s.)—This is a most fatiguing book, very brilliant, though the brilliance is sometimes as tinsel, but almost passing human endurance. Everything is at high pressure ; the meal, to change the metaphor, is all sack and spices and no bread. The hero, who tells his own story, always "talks tall," and his friends and enemies do the same. He is supposed to have come from the South to New York Province, and this is how he describes his emotions : "Hatred seized me for all this pale Northern world, where the very birds gyrated like moon-smitten sprites, and the white spectre of virtue sat amid orgies where bloodless fools caroused." He had come, he explains, from a land where "the grey bastions of St. Augustine reflected the gold and red of Spanish banners, and the blue sea mirrors a bluer sky." Of course all the book is not talk ; there is action, and very vehement action. The style changes, but it never changes to sobriety or restfulness. We must end as we began,—it is fatiguing.
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