CURRENT LITERATURE.
Down Dartmoor Way. By Eden Phillpotts. (Osgood, McIlvaine, and Co.)—In this volume of dialect stories from the West-country Mr. Phillpotts has collected a series of sketches of character and incident which, without having anything very strikingly original about them, are yet vigorous and freshly told. To readers familiar with the country of which he writes, the setting to the stories of Devonshire scenery will perhaps have an interest little short of that belonging to the stories themselves. The descriptions of Dartmoor, where the scene of several of his stories is laid, are specially good in their vividness and charm of realisation. As a background to the tragic and pathetic elements of human life, it would be hard to find anything fitter—in strangeness and beauty, and sense of space and solitariness—than those great stretches of moorland, with the enchantment of their varied and delicate combinations of light and colour and shadow, the stern- ness of their granits tors, and the beauty of their clear brown waters. The stories themselves are unequal, though they most of them have a humour and shrewdness of observation which makes them pleasant reading. What we miss, even in those which are most carefully constructed, is the fineness of workman- ship and the power of delicate and subtle suggestion which so often give to the short stories of the present day, however slight and homely their theme, so much originality and artistic grace. We orianot conclude our notice of the book without a word of protest against the sketch entitled "Behind the Devil's Teeth," a fishing story of unnatural and repulsive realism, which is not redeemed by the attempt to work out in it, in terrible and appropriate significance, the Nemesis which avenged the cruelty of a pecu- liarly coarse and brutal nature.
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