endurable. But we can heartily recommend it to both the credulous and the unbeliever as a clever, absorbing, and very carefully worked-out little tale.
Charles Reade piqued himself so much on his literary methods, and recounted them so freely, that in a carelessly worked-out melodramatic novel like "A Perilous Secret" one seems to detect signs of the scissors and paste-pot, and with his famous "scrap-book" at hand would be able to turn to the agglomeration of stories of changed children, incidents of mining-life, etc., from which he chose his leading incidents. The novel is sensational in the extreme, and, if it is not life-like, we have the author's explanation that he cannot waste time on such small effects as naturalness and reality. "The great analysts that have dealt microscopically with commonplace situations," he remarks in one place, when Mary the changeling halts between her real and assumed father, doubting which loves her best, "would revel in this one, and give you a curious volume of small incidents like the above, and vivisect the father's heart with patient skill. But we poor dramatists, taught by impatient audiences to move on, and taught by those great professors of verbosity, our female novelists and nine-tenths of our male, that it is just possible for 'masterly inactivity' alias sluggish narrative … to become a bore, are driven on to salient facts, and must trust a little to our readers' intelligence," etc. Mr. Reade's hold upon the public liking was gained nevertheless by very different work from anything either of these two volumes offers. But as these stories are the last which we shall have from that vigorous and virile mind, which held traditions of the days of the giants,—of whom he was the contemporary if not the equal,—they deserve a fair and generous tribute. His work was almost always strong and manly, although at times violent and crude: he nourished no weak idealism, and, if he did not realize his characters to his readers by taking imaginative possession of them and disclosing the real secrets of their natures, he at least painted them from the outside with vivid, truthful, and effective touches.
Mrs. Lang's "Dissolving Views" is one of those pleasantly-written books which seem to be a fairly accurate transcription of the every-day life going on among well-to-do people in England, but which nevertheless miss the least effect of reality, and, so far as human interest is concerned, might as well have been written about gnomes or water-nymphs. But, then, such fortunate people as those characters who sit in elegant houses in London and read "Le Monde où l'on s'ennuie," and cross the Channel to see the play acted at the Théâtre Français, like others blessed by the gods, ought to have no history written down. The common-place English novel has much declined in interest since the advent of æstheticism: if commonplace is to be, we prefer it in the shape of good hearty little tracts like "Miss Toosey's Mission" and "Laddie," rather than on the subject of Greek plays, high art, etc. For these two little stories, evidently gathered from the pages of some English Sunday magazine to be bound together in this pretty shape, are simple and pleasant in the extreme, and will rouse the sympathy and refresh the heart of many a reader.
"Mingo, and other Sketches in Black and White," have much of the quaint humor of Uncle Remus's stories and sayings and doings, and are at the same time wider in scope and more dramatic in action. Some of the stories, like "At Teague Poteet's," pass the border-lands which divide the mere sketch from romance, and offer something more than local and temporary interest. "Mingo" contains much dialect study, and a fine figure besides in the shape of the old negro who gives up his coveted freedom for "Miss Meely's baby." There is something nevertheless in these stories of life and character at the South to-day which suggests to the reader strife and suffering not yet complete, a problem not yet solved, a way not yet clear: thus they not only touch the heart, but they grasp the conscience, and give almost more pain than pleasure.
