The Rommany Stone. By J. H. Yoxall, M.P. (Longmans and
Co. Gs.)—One longs in reading this story for an interval of plain English. Never was such a conglomerate of tongues. There is Matt Scargil, yeoman, with his Derbyshire dialect; sundry gipsies with their lingo ; Bow Street runners talking Cockney, one of them with Methodistical variations ; a parish clerk with a pecu- liarly absurd " Johnsonese"; a parson with a still more absurd professional cant (he would hardly have included "original sin" among Methodistical errors) ; and an American who speaks " Yankee " (quite gratuitously, as he comes from Delaware). And then there is Mr. Yoxall himself with his gorgeous English, —" sinuous amethystine dale," "solitary and august glaciers," " shuddering starven trees," and so forth. The story wakes up now and then, and comes near to being good; too often it drones on, overpowered with its weight of ornament, ponderous humour, and satire of things and persons that are not to Mr. Yoxall's liking.
Previous page
