f public taste to hazard any prediction as to the
reception a particular book may meet with, especially if it rely
exclusively upon its own merits, and be not helped by the previous
reputation of the writer. But we certainly can and will say that to
readers of a certain cast it will present strong attractions, and that
no candid critic can read it without pronouncing it to be a remarkable
work and the production of an original mind. The author we should judge
to be a man who had lived a good deal in solitude, or at least removed
from his intellectual peers,--who had been through much spiritual
struggle in the course of his life,--who had been more accustomed to
think than to write, at least for the press,--and whose own observation
had revealed to him some of the darker aspects of the Roman Catholic
faith and practice.

There is very little skill in the construction of the plot. Most of the
events stand to each other in the relation of accidental and not of
necessary succession, and might be transposed without doing any harm.
Many pages are written simply as illustrations of character; and a fair
proportion of the novel might be called with strict propriety a series
of sketches connected by a slight thread of narrative. But it would be
unreasonable to deal sharply with an author for this defect; for the
faculty of making a well-constructed story, in which every event shall
come in naturally, and yet each bring us one step nearer to the
journey's end, is now one of the lost arts of earth. But this is not
all. A considerable portion of it must be pronounced decidedly slow. We
use the word not in its slang application, but in the sense in which
Goldsmith used it in the first line of "The Traveller," or rather, as
Johnson told him he used it, when he said to him,--"You do not mean
tardiness of locomotion; you mean that sluggishness of mind which comes
upon a man in solitude." But the slowness of which novel-readers will
complain is not mere commonplace, least of all is it dulness. It is the
leisurely movement of a contemplative mind full of rich thought and
stored with varied learning. Such a writer _could not_ have any sympathy
with the mercurial, vivacious, light-of-foot story-tellers of the French
school. The author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay," we surmise,
has not been in the habit of packing up his thoughts for the market, by
either writing for the press, or conversing with clever and
nimble-witted men and wom