accuracy by writing what joy did he not feel?'; far be it from him to say he bought it cheap'; he feels all the pride of a modern Priscian when he has set down 'he bought it cheaply.' The best piece of misplaced and perverted purism we have recently met was in a daily paper which recorded that an electoral division had 'voted solidly' for a certain candidate. 'Voted solid' is an ugly phrase, but it can at least be analysed; the electors were so unanimous in their voting that the expression of their choice was solid, unbroken by dissentients; 'solid 'is proleptic, like the adjective in dyed red'; but 'voted solidly' is absolute nonsense. The journalist's knowledge was just enough to keep him from slipping fortuitously into a sound construction, from doing a grammatical act by chance,' as Aristotle quaintly puts it. To parody a well-known oxymoron: His ignorance in knowledge rooted stood: While we are justified in claiming a place in a comparatively small and select circle for a writer who can even construct his sentences correctly, and in holding up to admiration a novelist who can attain the brilliant finish of Mr. Norris, we feel, however, that this is not the largest debt which we owe him. We entertain a sense of personal gratitude to every writer whose ambition is to carry on the tradition of English fiction from Jane Austen to Thackeray, and who sets his face against the sensationalism which is the greatest danger threatening modern fiction. We do not detect any sign of a revulsion of feeling against sensationalism. We fear the taste for it is even growing ἐν ἀρχῇ πῆμα κοὐδέπω μεσοί. Nor does the utter inanity of the most characteristic products of this school seem to threaten the vitality of the school itself. Macbeth complains that 'The times have been, That when the brains were out the man would die.' But the want of brains seems to help this class of fiction to live and thrive. Making all reasonable deductions for unthinking exaggeration and for deliberate misstatement, we suppose we may take it that the 'Mystery of a Hansom Cab' has commanded a larger sale than any other story of our day, even in its own class. Yet bad as are all the shilling dreadfuls, most of them are high works of art compared with this detestable production. What can have attracted the public we confess ourselves unable to conjecture. It is a tale of a commonplace murder, murder, written in the vilest English, in which the criticisms on life and manners would argue abnormal stupidity in a boy of fourteen, in whicht here is not even an attempt to portray a character, and in which (strangest feature of all) the plot is as uninteresting as the style is vulgar, profusely decorated as it is with the Gordian knot,'' the sword of Damocles,' the couch of Procustes' (sic), and other classical allusions, which, even if correctly made, are hateful, as having long since become broken-winded and worn out. We wonder who was the 'cynical writer' from whom the author cites the apophthegm that, after all, the illusions of youth are mostly due to the want of experience;' and what 'Penny Educator' supplied the citations from Latin and French? The future career of a classical quotation seems to be as much at the mercy of chance as the success of man himself, and the fittest do not seem to survive. We suppose hardly a day passes in which timeo Danaos is not aired somewhere; Macaulay's apt 'cur quis non prandeat hoc est?' from Persius has, we believe, never been used a second time. But it is not only for its prevailing literary imbecility, that we deplore the rise of a kind of literature which bids fair to inflict serious injury on the legitimate novel; we find in it a moral defect, which is, we believe, peculiar to it. We refer to the dishonest attempt to add to the interest of the story by using solemn and impressive language in attestation of its truth. About a year ago the hoardings and other advertisement-spaces of London were disfigured by a horrible picture of a young girl falling in blood under an assassin's knife. This was an incident in a story called 'Devlin the Barber,' a disagreeable but certainly ingenious tale, which we would by no means treat so unfairly as to class it with the 'Hansom Cab.' Our chief quarrel with its author is that he seems to pledge his personal veracity for obviously impossible incidents. What I am about to narrate is absolutely true,' says the character in whose mouth he puts the tale. This, however, might be defendedthe narrator is a fictitious personage, and cannot give real evidence. But Mr. B. L. Farjeon is no fictitious personage, and we confess that this note on p. 102, attesting as it does the truth of plainly incredible statements, seems to us, to say the least, too splendide mendax: 'I have this desk, with its contents, now in my possession. The extraordinary revelations made therein (which I may mention have no connection with the present story) will one day be made public. -B. L. F.' Surely this distinctly pledges the credit of Mr. B. L. Farjeon for the objective existence of Devlin the Barber,' and, by parity of reasoning. reasoning, for his incredible powers and impossible feats. We regret to have to confess, that a precedent for this practice is to be found in Charles Dickens, of whose good qualities, too, Mr. Farjeon sometimes succeeds in executing tolerable imitations—we mean imitations which may be perused with only subacute sensations of pain. In the 'Trial for Murder,' a tale published in 1865 as a chapter in 'Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions,' Dickens does not, it is true, make himself responsible for the truth of a clearly incredible narrative, but he makes the narrator say, 'Of that I am as strictly sure as of every other statement that I make here,' which is, indeed, perhaps a sufficiently moderate declaration. This, however, seems to us to be hardly fair, when we think of the effect which it might have on an unexperienced reader:— 'My reader is to make the most that can reasonably be made of my feeling jaded, having a depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being slightly dyspeptic. I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer to my request for it.' All such attempts to recommend to credence extravagant inventions we hold to be bad in art, and even open to objection morally; and we regret that writers of a certain ability, like Mr. Farjeon and Mr. Conway, should have applied their powers to the particular field of effort which they have chosen. But for reading a book like the Hansom Cab' there is no excuse, except that one may put oneself in a position to condemn it wholly. Such must be the judgment of all, who believe that in fiction there is any source of instruction, culture, or even rational amusement. It is this class who will thank us for introducing them to Mr. Norris—or rather those among this class, who have not been yet fortunate enough to make his acquaintance. The manner and method of Mr. Norris at once suggest a comparison with Thackeray. Indeed this has already been drawn by a brilliant and judicious critic. Would Thackeray,' Mr. Andrew Lang recently asked, 'have failed to recognize a worthy follower in Mr. Norris, who is indeed the Thackeray of a later age?' Reflections on life, its hypocrisies, and its euphemisms, coupled with a cynical, because only half-sincere, defence of the world with all its faults and shams, have always been affected by novelists from Fielding down. This is a powerful instrument in the grasp of a Fielding or a Thackeray; but it is an edged tool which is likely to cut the hands that use it unskilfully. A writer cannot moralize without giving us Vol. 168.-No. 336. glimpses 2 F glimpses of his own personality; and, by a sad dispensation of Providence, the more disagreeable the personality of an author is, the more prone he is to bestow it upon us. With all his vigour and with many good gifts, does not Charles Reade inspire one with a perhaps unreasonable loathing of that self, which he is ever obtruding on us, and even of those of his fictitious characters whom he seems personally to admire? Again, the buoyant spirits of Mr. James Payn are, we own, to us unaccountably depressing. Now, Mr. Norris is sparing of bestowing his individuality on the reader, and, when he does, he employs that ironical self-assertion by which Thackeray always so cleverly disarmed criticism. Who but Thackeray could have written the 'Book of Snobs' without bringing on himself the retort, that he himself was a snob and the father of it'? Thackeray turned the edge of such a weapon, by boldly assuming the character which he knew would be ascribed to him and I ought to know, considering that I might have been seen last Thursday by any one who happened to be in Piccadilly walking arm in arm with a Marquess.' In the same vein Mr. Norris, instead of posing as a preacher or reformer with a high moral purpose, is rather disposed to sneer at his own craft, and so disarm criticism. In My Friend Jim,' the teller of the tale is a literary man, and we learn something about his estimate of literary men as members of society, and his consciousness of the kind cruelties to which they have to submit at the hands of their friends : : 'During certain months of the year I went a good deal into society, where it was my great good fortune now and then to meet with somebody who had never written a book or even contributed to a magazine. I have always found such persons exceptionally clever and interesting; but they are becoming more and more rare, and will soon, I fear, be extinct. . . . I told him all about myself, and his observations on my literary achievements were flattering, though I think he was a little bit anxious lest I should ask him had he read my works.' ... In 'Adrian Vidal' the hero is again an author, and we have frequent peeps into Mr. Norris's views about the profession of the novelist, which Mr. James Payn extols so highly as an equally lucrative and elevating pursuit. Mr. Norris's views are not so roseate. He recognizes that a man who lives by his pen must be able complacently to put up with work which falls below the utmost limit of his powers; you must amuse people; you cannot string together a set of essays and call it a novel. The novel-reading public means mainly the women, and love -the English variety, not the French-is the one subject that interests interests them all. Mr. Norris sees that the time has gone by for sweeping indictments against immorality or even vulgarity. What is now needed is a certain smartness-a light-handed, light-hearted treatment of the problems and the sins of life, the Horatian flick, not the Juvenalian scourge: "The kind of hard hitting that amused our fathers offends us; and it would be almost as disagreeable to us to read another such onslaught as Macaulay made upon Robert Montgomery as to see a man throw a glass of wine in his neighbour's face." Mr. Norris may claim kinship with Thackeray, not only in the points which we have mentioned, but in many others. In 'Mademoiselle de Mersac' he ventures-always a hazardous experiment-on tracing the fortunes of the De Mersacs through two or three generations before the period at which the story begins. One remembers how in like cases, to relieve the monotony which besets such a narrative, Dickens is forced to sound his most broadly comic stop, and one shudders when one thinks of the attempts of some of his imitators in the same direction. Mr. Norris has the light touch of Thackeray, who guides us through three or four generations as gracefully as a well-bred man might point out the portraits of his ancestors in the family picture-gallery. But most of all does he resemble the great master of modern fiction in his esprit malin et railleur, in his recoil from the obsolete and hackneyed, from worn-out slangs, allusions and quotations-in a word, in his possession of that quality of EUTρаTEλía which really has scarcely an English name, and which was so well defined by Aristotle as πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις, or refined insolence. When Mrs. Winnington, in 'No New Thing,' remarks that in her young days it had not been customary to encourage school girls to give themselves ridiculous and impertinent airs, Philip assents from the other side of the table, adding that one of the faults of the present system of education was the teaching of accomplishments, which so many of the last generation had shown themselves capable of acquiring without any aid. Mrs. Winnington knew the world, and was not so simple as to believe that it contained any sincere or conscientious people. except herself. She possessed in a remarkable degree that exasperating quality known as tact," and on one occasion, when all the magnates of the surrounding district and various clerical dignitaries from Craybridge were present at a great dinner, as some of them did not happen to be on speaking terms, Mrs. Winnington had large opportu nities for the display of tact, and enjoyed herself very m |