CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Earth Trembled. By Edward P. Roe. (Ward, Lock, and Co.)—This is a rather inferior story for a writer who has acquired each a reputation as its author has done in the United States, and, to some relent, also here. A great deal of skill is undoubtedly drown by Mr. Roe in utilising the great earthquake in Charlestown, and in making it illustrate differences of character, and even of race. His negro types, 'Circle Sheba and Aunt Sheba, and Kern, and all the rest, with their humour and their pathos, their selfishness and their recklessness, are also admirable; and we doubt much if there is any living writer who could do them so much justice as Mr. Roe has done. The hatred, too, of the South to the North after the war is very o'everly reproduced in the person of Mrs. Hunter, and in the obstacles that are thrown in the way of the leading pair of lovers, Mara and Clancy. At the.same time, The Earth Trembled is too long, and its plot is too involved for it to be accounted a perfect story even of Mr. Roe's kind. We think, too, the sensuous siren, Miss Ainsley, is oat of place is a book of this sort. On the other hand, we must speak in very high terms of the really and not conventionally graphic description that Mr. Roe gives of the first shock of the Charlestown earthquakee.
Previous page
