Does " A Peer's Son," who writes The Radical's Daughter
(Long- mane), fancy that all would be well with us if only some Conservative in the position of Lord Randolph Churchill were to marry the daughter of a Liberal like Mr. Chamberlain, having obtained the latter's consent by magnanimously defending Mr. Gladstone against an attack by such a partisan as Mr. Aehmead-Bartlett ? Cer- tainly Perfectham, in which the scene of this story is laid, recalls Birmingham, in spite of its having a population of 30,000 only ; and there are certain passages in the life of Mr. Strike, its leading spirit, which look like quotations from biographies of Mr. Chamber- lain written from a very different standpoint from Mr. Marriott's. Rupert Fane, the Tory Democratic son of the high-and-dry but worthy Tory, Lord Sarbiton, falls in love with Miss Strike, and at the same time gets returned for Perfectham in the " Constitutional " interest. The two papas object strongly to the match ; but the aristocratic one relents, mainly because—this is Barely rather ignoble on Lord &whiten's part—he would like to enrich his im- poverished house with plebeian gold. At length Fane, by a generous de- fence of the Liberal Prime Minister against members of his own party, gets at Mr. Strike's heart, and Miss Strike is able at the end of the story to send this message to her lover on—horribile dicta-- a post- card, " Yon may come and see papa." There is much immaturity in The Radical's Daughter ; but there is also liveliness, sometimes, however, suggestive of the mess-room and even of the fourth form. Probably the author means well in politics, and will be able to make his characters in some future story talk politics well. Meanwhile, we are grateful to him for this account of the manner in which a young man educates himself into Tory Democracy :—" Rupert Fane had read Stubbs and Freeman, and Lecky and Green. He bad read Hallam and Gibbon ; he had with immense labour really understood Adam Smith and Mill. He had worked up the American constitu- tion, and knew almost every work on the French Revolution." " With immense labour really understood" is delicious.
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