THE ROMANCE OF FINANCE.t
WEYMAN'S gift of narrative is well represented in a story which might not seem, on the surface, to hold so much potential excitement and romance as such of the author's earlier works as A Gentleman of Prance or The Red Cockade. The boom in trade following Waterloo helped more than anything else the development of our present vastly complicated system of finance. It was the time when bankers were considered speculators, and ill-reputed ; useful enough to carry through or advise an investment when money was plentiful, but not to be trusted with it when rumours undermined credit and the • Miss Mapp. By B. F. Benson. LOndon : Hutchinson. [7s. 6d. net.] t oviwitaa. a Bank. By Stanley J. WCYM1111. London: John Murray. [7s. 6d.1
name of the Bank of England was no longer good enough to turn paper into gold. On the thread of a love-affair between the banker's son and the squire's daughter Mr. Weyman strings a tale of much wider import, that of the establishing of the financier (the successful financier, it must be said) on the same social level as the landed gentry.
That apotheosis has not yet been reached when the novel ends, for Mr. Wcyman is always a story-teller in the first place, an historian afterwards, and it is sufficient for the purposes of the former that Clement Ovington should be reasonably certain of securing the hand of Squire Griffin's daughter. Such an outline does not do justice to a tale of flesh and blood, but readers of Mr. Weyman will be familiar with his skill in filling in the emotional life of a bygone period. He achieves solidity when so often the period novel is a thing of costume, of mere decoration ; his men and women are not twentieth-century folk engaged in amateur theatricals, but real people grown out of the conditions that surround them. By no other means could the reader become so interested in the fortunes of Ovington's Bank, nor the account of its struggle against disaster in the days of panic and the " run " take on the intensity of a Homeric combat.
There is only one weak spot in a piece of work which bears every mark of sound craftsmanship, and that is the accident.. by which the old squire lost his sight. It was so opportune a little later when his nephew required his signature to the transfer of some stock, which the old man, with the use of his eyes, would never have signed. It is a pity, because it is always so much prettier to see a knot untied than cut ; but there is plenty of ingenuity elsewhere to make up for that solitary blemish.
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