origin. I will not tell you the story, for one reason because its charm is too elusive to retrieve. I content myself by saying that it seems to me the best work we have yet had from Mr. Calthrop, combining his special and expected graces with an unusual and moving sincerity.
A month or two ago I have no doubt that the England of Charles II.'s declining years would have seemed to me a monstrously exciting country to live in; at the present moment (unfairly enough) I feel more like congratulating the hero of Monsignor Benson's Oddsfish! (Hutchinson) on the mildness of his adventures for the furtherance of the Catholic faith. It is true that Mr. Roger Mallock beheld some notable executions after the Titus Oates affair, and on the night of the Rye House Plot had a large meat chopper thrown at his head by one of the conspirators; but, emissary of the Vatican as he was, he was actually only once compelled to whip out his sword in self-defence, though on that occasion he had the extreme bad luck to lose his fiancée through a misdirected dagger-thrust. Even this tragedy, sufficiently overwhelming in an ordinary romance, is not, of course, wholly disastrous in Monsignor Benson's eyes, since it enabled Mr. Mallock to resume the religious life and habit for which he had been originally intended. For the rest the book is written in a most captivating manner, and with a plausibility of incident and dialogue only too rare in novels of the Restoration period. Evidently the author has studied his authorities (and more particularly Mr. Pepys) with a praise-worthy diligence. But in view of the anti-Protestant bias which he naturally exhibits I feel bound to bid him have a care. If he intends to pursue his historical researches any further, and discover (let us say) virtue in the Spanish Inquisition and villainy in Sir Francis Drake, I shall load my arquebus to the muzzle.
The hero of King Jack (Hodder and Stoughton) "made sport," as his creator, Mr. Keighley Snowden, says, "nearly a hundred years ago " in Yorkshire, and incidentally he also made records. For instance, he cleared four-and-twenty feet at a "run-jump," and with this in my mind I find it satisfactory to think that he lived in another century, or I might find myself regretting the eclipse of the Olympic Games. As an upholder of law and order I ought to be (I am not) ashamed to admire a man who, to say the least of it, was a very prickly thorn in the side of the police. My excuse is that Jack Sincler and his brother Lisle were kindly men withal. The game-laws were their trouble, but as far as I could make out they did not poach for the sake of pelf but from sheer love of sport. Among poachers they ought, anyhow, to be placed in Class I., for they loved the open air and the freshness of the morning and all the things that make for a clean mind in a clean body. Jack, though a shade arrogant at times, is a stimulating figure, human both in his weakness and his strength; and Mr. Snowden deserves more than a little gratitude for the care with which he has reproduced the atmosphere of times that were conspicuously lawless and exciting.
When Dicky Furlong, the brilliant and aspiring artist of The Achievement (Chapman and Hall) who was in love with Diana Charteris, sloshed her husband, Lord Freddy, over the head with his own decanter (vide Chap. XXI.) he rather overdid it. For "the jagged thing fell with a sullen thud behind his (Lord Freddy's) ear," and that discourteous nobleman collapsed to rise no more. When the detective arrived the following noon he convinced himself that there was no necessity to detain any of the guests, even though no windows had been found open or doors unlocked, and though Dicky had a contused lip from the conflict overnight and everybody had coupled his name with Diana's. However, the methodical sleuthhound ran his quarry to earth a year or two later, just as he had put the finishing touches to his great, (seventeen-foot) canvas. And Dicky took a little bottle out of his pocket. In fact, our old friend the novelette, with its unexacting canons of plausibility; tacked on, as it happens, to twenty chapters of meandering incident, a long way after the well-known Five-Towns formula, garnished with pleasantly romantic little notices of Dicky's pictures and Dicky's love affairs. But you don't begin to see the Dicky of the decanter phase (even though a fight about an ill-treated dog is lugged in for the purpose), or indeed any other Dicky of real flesh and blood, in this haphazard selection of episodes and comments. The truth is there is more in that difficult and dangerous formula than Mr. Temple Thurston is aware of. He has wandered into the wrong galley. A pity. For Mrs. Flint is a dear, if a stupid dear, and Dicky himself has his points.
The Old Man. "I see by the paper here that the Rooshians are attacking a town they spell P-R-Z-M-Y-S-L. D'ye think, now, wud that be a mistake of the printer's or wud the letters of it be mixed up, like, wi' the bombardment?"
[The London correspondent of a German paper announces that London is on the verge of starvation, his own diet being "reduced to bread and rancid dripping."]
"There is a languor in this alien air;
We are reduced, in fact, to famine fare;
Mine, I may say, is dripping based on bread
(Ugh!), and I gather I shall soon be dead.
It is the same all over, East or West;
Hungry each hollow just below the chest.
Daily, I'm told, they rake the very dust,
Hoping in vain to come across a crust.
And, when our God-born Wilhelm brings his Huns
ere, he will find a few odd skeletons."
Such is the tale a Teuton lately writ.
How, then, I ask, does London look so fit?
This is the reason, mainly, I surmise—
We are fed up, of course, with German Lies.
