Tom Bulkeley of Lissingion. A Novel. By R. Mounteney Jephson.
(Bentley.)—The cultus of the horse is as striking a feature in English -fiction as it is in English fact. That noble, but misused and rather tiresome animal holds so prominent a place in modern novels of the ephemeral kind, that it is hard to say which class of novelists writes about him most voluminously,—the large number who know little or nothing about horses, or the small number who know all about them. Mr. Trollops and the Author of "Guy Livingstone " are, in their widely different ways, chiefly accountable for the innumerable stories of hunting and lawsuits which are turned out in three-volume form -week after week, and which, we suppose, must find somebody to read them for pleasure. Tom Bulkeley is, however, not a copy of a sportsman by Mr. Trollopo, but a compound of one of Mr. Henry Kingsley's heroes with one of Mr. Lawrence's. The story has a dash of brigandage which has real spirit in it, and is interesting in itself, as well as because it permits the reader to get out of sight and hearing of the stable and the race-course for a while. It is due to the author to observe that his Tom Bulkeley is like Mr. Lawrence's heroes only in being a prodigy, and unboundedly popular ; he is not a cynical libertine, or an ennuye' ruffian ; and that the moral of the book is unexceptionable. The punishment of Fane Vereker is told with real power and picturesqueness, and is a proof that there are far better things within the author's powers than the race-course and mess-room slang, and the doings of young men, the best of whom are only silly, which make up the greater part of this novel.
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