Lutchmee and Rilloo: a Study of West - Indian Life. By Edward
Jenkins. (Mullen and Son.)—The author of " Gina's Baby " reminds ats of Mrs. Hominy, when she talked her own books, accompanied by the use of the Major's pocket-handkerchief. He rewrites his own Blue- book on the Coolie question, and a dull, tiresome, unromantic, and unreasonable combination of romance and reality is the result. Dilloo, the typical coolie, though sufficiently betrayed and ill-treated to furnish a pendant for "Uncle Tom," is done to death by a countryman of his own, not by the Legrees of British Guiana, and all the terrible exam- ples of injustice and cruelty in the coolie-employing colonies are massed together in the one against which Mr. Jenkins hurls tho 'heavy weapons of his fiction. While we are more than willing that he should have ample opportunities of urging his views of coolio labour and its abuses, and wish him success in the reformation of the latter, we are bound t3 protest, as reviewers of novels, against the method -which he has adopted to effect the former, for we must pronounce Lutchmee and Dilloo a failure as a novel. As "A Study of West-Indian Life," the book is deficient in the local colouring which stories of strange places and modes of life must have, to be attractive to the general reader.
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