The Young Physician. By F. Brett Young. (Collins. 7s. nct.)—This
novel is of a type of which there have been lately a good many examples—a minutely detailed description of a boy's life through his schooldays to adolescence. The last section of the story, dealing with rather brutal realism with Edwin ingleby's life as a medical student, is the most original but not the pleasantest. The chapters describing his journey to the Mendip Hills with his father after his mother's death are delightful reading. The gradual change in young Edwin's mind from a rather shocked dismay at finding that his paternal uncle is a working gardener, to feelings of pride in the sturdy qualities of the Inglebys, is drawn with much subtlety, and the pictures of the West Countryside are enchanting. Altogether, the figure of the hero is vividly realized, and the reader will part from him with considerable reluctance at the outset of his professional career. The inclusion in this story of the episode of Rosie Beaucaire, although of course true enough to life, is to be regretted. To paraphrase Bacon, "The novel is more in- debted to Love than Life," and but for this and one more rather tiresome and trivial incident Mr. Brett Young would have succeeded in producing a long and interesting work of fiction in which the relations of sex played no part whatever.
Previous page
