The New River, by Edward Fitzgibbon (Ward and Downey), deserves
a special word of commendation, as being a very suc- cessful and yet quite unpretentious effort to reproduce London life in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is a story of the times of Hugh Myddelton, who in the matter of the Metropolitan water-supply, was justly regarded as a public benefactor by his fellow-citizens, and he figures here as the patron and friend of Will Lewyn, Mr. Fitzgibbon's hero. The villain of the story, Dick Carter, is an idle apprentice who degenerates into a scoundrel fit only for Alsatia or Norfolk Island; and as he is Will's rival in love and in other things, we have a stirring plot, in the course of which Mr. Fitzgibbon takes us to Bartholomew Fair, introduces us to the 'prentices of London, and performs by deputy various other achievements of the kind dear to juvenile, and not despised by adult, devotees of historical romance. All ends happily, however, for the good people of The New River. Mr. Fitzgibbon will, it is to be hoped, never be tempted into writing with less care than he exhibits here.
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