he steps of Sir Thomas
More and Sir Philip Sidney, and picture life as it should be rather than
as it is. His hero, an Englishman of our own time, puzzled and
distressed at the social misery and discord surrounding him, leaves
England and joins an exploring expedition. In the unexplored recesses of
the new world he comes across a colony founded in ancient days by a
people who have preserved an idyllic purity of heart and manners,
together with a fuller artistic life and truer civilization than our
own. To these people he brings his stories of London as it is to-day,
and fills their gentle hearts with amazement and dismay. A slender
thread of love-making gives the book its romantic charm. He gains the
affections of the king's daughter, a beautiful maiden, who has been
attracted to him from the very first; and with her he hopes to realize
all that has been unknown to him of noble life in his own country. But
the book does not end with its hero and heroine lapped in slothful
content. For the heart of the maiden burns with sorrow for the toiling
poor of the great European cities of which he has told her: to her this
region has also the charm of "The Unexplored," and the book ends with a
hint that she and her husband are about to wend their way, with a new
gospel in their hand, to the very city of which he had shaken the dust
from his shoes in disgust before he found an unexplored Arcadia.

There was not much novelty in the plot--the charm of the book lay in the
way the story was told, in the beauty of the language; and also--last
but not least--the burning earnestness of the author's tone as he
contrasted the hopeless, heartless misery of the poor in our great
cities with the ideal life of man. His pictures of London life, drawn
from the street, the hospital, the workhouse, were touched in with
merciless fidelity: his satire on the modern benevolence and modern
civilization which allows such evils to flourish side by side with
lecture-rooms, churches, intellectual culture, and refined luxury was
keen and scathing. It was a book which had startled people, but had also
brought many new truths to their minds. And although no one could be
more startled, yet no one could be more avid for the truth than the
author's own daughter, of whom he had never thought in the very least
when he wrote the book.

Lesley rose from her perusal of it with burning cheeks and humid eyes.
She herself, without knowing it, was in much the same posit