A Peakland Faggot. By R. Murray Gilchrist. (Grant Richards.) —Here
Mr. Gilchrist gives us vigorous pictures of his dwellers in
a Peak village. Few of them, it must be allowed, are pleasant to behold, but he lures us on by giving now and then a glimpse of the sun. After the unmixed gloom of the " Gaffer's Masterpiece."
when a mischievous lout destroys the labour of the old man's life, and "A Family Supper," when Emma Palfrey is cruelly wounded through her love for her idiot brother, we come to a delightful little idyll in "The Gap in the Wall," wherein Keziah Unwin, who has flouted all the youth of her village, has to surrender, half against her will, to the masterful Rafe Paramour. The writer of this notice has gone beyond his duty in reading all these tales, and he would advise others to follow his example, though they will not always be pleased.
Two little volumes –The Rudeness of the Hon. Mr. Leatherhead and A Homburg Story, by Gordon Seymour (Grant Richards)—
bear the common title of "Ethics of the Surface." In the first the author explains his purpose, which is to illustrate what may be called "social duties" by the help of fiction. The first is scarcely a success, though it is a powerful exposition of the very great significance which a man's manners may have ; the second is distinctly good. It is relieved by the humorous touch of Campbell's error in mistaking the daughters of the mediatised Prince for the real objects of his sympathy.
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