Jabez Oliphant ; or, the Merchant Prince. 3 vols. (Bentley.)—This
book is called on the title-page " a novel," but it does not answer the description. Jabez is a man who has realized a large fortune in the tea treat), and who retires to his native village, Roinsber, in the Craven country, where he acts the part of a social reformer, and hopes to bring about a local millennium. From first to last, this character—the man and his doings—is a caricature, and made so consciously by the author. For instance, "The Society for the Propagation of Virtue," which Jabez founds in Reineber, with its system of marks, five for going to church on Sunday, ten for going on a week-day, five for eating a cold dinner on Sunday, &c., is a very good joke ; but it is out of place in what should be, from its description, a tale of real life, as much out of place as by common rules of taste we hold a ghost or any supernatural appearance to be. In fact, men and things that are quite natural and probable are mixed up with men and things that are neither the one nor the other.
For, besides the comic figure of Jabez, there is the tragic figure, con- ceived in a most melodramatic spirit, of Lord Stainmore, who constructs a plot against his rival, which is about as improbable as Mr. Oliphant's "Society." This incongruity between the real and the unreal diminishes but does not destroy the reader's pleasure in a clover book. Some of the sketches are very good, the old Tory Squire, Sir George Highside, the cynical Mr. Fothorgill, and the heroine, whose brisk skirmishes with her uncle's enemies we enjoy greatly, are all excellent.
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