expressive phrase, by which we have heard Irish peasants affirm
a
certainty of recognition beyond betrayal by time. Stories which turn upon the successful concealment of an individual's identity from the knowledge of relatives and friends have always been un- satisfactory to us, because they are so improbable. " Our Mutual Friend'' if not the worst of Dickens's novels, is very weak in its plot ; Caleb Plummer's son, "from the golden South Americas," as the white-headed guest, in "A Christmas Carol," is the most strained and foolish of his fanciful Christmas creations.
It would need very great ingenuity and constructive power to carry out, to any skilful or artistic conclusion, a story in which a young girl should fail to recognise her betrothed lover, when he returns in the- character of a friend who enjoyed the confidence of the supposed deceased, in his lifetime, and in that character woos her over again.. The anther of Some Day or Other does not possess either ingenuity or power adequate to the task she has imposed upon herself, and her novel, although not destitute of some merit, and written with a great deal of ease, fails to make any impression of life-likeness upon the reader. The situations are not real, and the personages do not live:
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