novel. The Little Minister is that full-blown novel, and it is an effort over which any true friend of Mr. Barrie's should weep. What a perfect, what a grotesque mishap it is! The book is an irremediable failure because it is utterly wrong as a whole. What a mere circus caricature is the central personage, that inhuman 'Egyptian woman'! Has Mr. Barrie indeed never read Carmen? Or did it happen that, in some dripping and dingy Scotch town, a bedraggled company of strolling singers played some mournful malversion of the opera of Louis Bizet? And was Mr. Barrie there, and did it strike him that he could take the glancing figure of the Spanish gipsy girl and put her to better local use with an Auld Licht ministerial prig and a mass of local colour? Surely he could not have read Prosper Mérimée's novel and dared to exploit, and ruin in the exploitation, its delicious heroine? The book is absurd because its main feature is absurd. All that it contains of any value whatever is to be found in the touches of the Thrums life in the style of the Window. To all appearance Mr. Barrie's vein of ore is a thin one—a very thin one; and can he congratulate himself on the compensating fact that it is passably pure?
His next volume will probably be the decisive one of his work. No one would wish to limit its scope.
