The Laird's Deed of Settlement. By J. M. Kippen. (Digby,
Long, and Co.)—In those times, when literary conceits are all the vogue, it is a genuine pleasure to come across such an old-fashioned story as The Laird's Deed of Settlement, with an old-fashioned plot, and written in such old-fashioned Madame D'Arblayesque English as,—" Such trite similitudes as the feelings of the tempest-tossed mariner on reaching the haven of rest and peace ; or of the belated traveller when, following a faint glimmering ray of light amidst surrounding darkness, ho is guided to the warmth, comfort, and glad welcome of the friendly hearth, would inadequately convey an idea of the overwhelming joy experienced by the lovers in their present reunion, after all their doubts, anxieties, and fears since last they had parted." Sometimes this style gets alarming, and one wishes he could break up some of the enormous sentences with which he is confronted almost every fourth page or so, into tenths. But the style generally is so much of a piece with the story, which, although melodramatic, is healthy, and is full of sensa- tion and incidents of many kinds, that one gets positively to like it in a sneaking sort of way. The Highland variety of the Scotch dialect with which The Laird's Deed of Settlement is liberally peppered, is fairly good.
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