Brunet's Tower. By Eden Phillpotte. (William Heinemann. 6s.)—Mr. Phillpotts's last
long novel was a disappointment to us, for he did not seem at his ease away from Dartmoor; but the results of his experiment are now evident. He has come back to his familiar country with a deeper experience of psychology, a more intimate power of characterization, a breadth of outlook which was lacking in some of his earlier work. Harvey Porter, as a runaway from a reformatory to the potteries of Easterbrook and Pitts. is a boy of distinct charm, with a strain of guile and meanness in his nature which, as be grows to manhood, makes him a complex and engrossing figure. As his personality develops, so the interest of the story and the skill of its writing increase; for Mr. Phillpotts indulges at first in a curious trick of inverting his sentences, which is lees apparent towards the end of the book. At the beginning he has felt, moreover, such keen interest in the technicalities of the potter's craft that he has allowed them undue prominence where he should have aced them so subtly as to leave us scarcely conscious of the component elements of the general atmosphere.
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