Rachel Harr. By Morley Roberts. (Eveleigh Nash. 6e.)— Students of
Dickens will remember Mr. Pecksniff's perplexity about the name of "those fabulous animals (pagan, I regret to think) who used to sing in the water," and the readers of Rachel Harr may be excused for wondering in the first chapter whether the heroine is one of their number. She certainly is rather pagan in her ideas, and in the first chapter she holds a long conversation by moonlight with a gentleman on a horse whilst she is standing in the sea, with the water (as Mr. Morley Roberts is careful to assure us) up to her chin. The book is chiefly about the Sensations of its characters when they are the victims of Passion (with a capital "P"). In works of this kind there is a very narrow margin separating the sublime and the ridiculous, and unfortunately Mr. Morley Roberts constantly oversteps it. Perhaps the opening scene strikes the keynote of hilarity, for in it, as described above, the heroine's head protrudes from the waves in a manner which reminds ono irresistibly of a cocoanut on a stick at a fair. At any rate, it is very difficult to take the book seriously.
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