homage of the new Western towns
(Trilbyville!) and patent bug exterminators named after the heroine.
It may, possibly, be worth while examining the predominant qualities
of the two books with a view to ascertain what light their
similarities and differences may throw upon the respective literary
tastes of the Englishman and the American.

There has, I believe, been no important critical denial of the right
of "The Manxman" to rank as a "strong" book. The plot is drawn with
consummate skill--not in the sense of a Gaborian-like unravelment of
mystery, but in its organic, natural, inevitable development, and in
the abiding interest of its evolution. The details are worked in with
the most scrupulous care. Rarely, in modern fiction, have certain
elemental features of the human being been displayed with more
determination and pathos.

The central _motif_ of the story--the corrosion of a predominantly
righteous soul by a repented but hidden sin culminating in an
overwhelming necessity of confession--is so powerfully presented to us
that we forget all question of originality until our memory of the
fascinating pages has cooled down. Then we may recall the resemblance
of theme in the recent novel entitled "The Silence of Dean Maitland,"
while we find the prototype of both these books in "The Scarlet
Letter" of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has handled the problem with a
subtlety and haunting weirdness to which neither of the English works
can lay any claim. As our first interest in the story farther cools,
it may occur to us that the very perfection of plot in "The Manxman"
gives it the effect of a "set piece;" its association with Mr. Wilson
Barrett and the boards seems foreordained. It may seem to us that
there is a little forcing of the pathos, that a certain artificiality
pervades the scene. In a word, we may set down "The Manxman" as
melodrama--melodrama at its best, but still melodrama. Its effects are
vivid, positive, sensational; its analysis of character is keen, but
hardly subtle; it appeals to the British public's love of the obvious,
the full-blooded, the thorough-going; it runs on well-tried lines; it
is admirable, but it is not new.

"Trilby" is a very different book, and it would be a catholic palate
indeed that would relish equally the story of the Paris grisette and
the story of the Manx deemster. In "Trilby" the blending of the novel
and the romance, of the real and the fantastic, is as much of a
stumbling-blo