* * * *

I very distinctly feel that "KATHARINE TYNAN" could have made a first-rate
novel of _Denys the Dreamer_ (COLLINS) and have had plenty over for a good
second if she had taken the trouble. But her fluent pen runs away with her
down paths that lead nowhere in particular, instead of developing her main
characters and situations to an intelligible and satisfactory point.
_Denys_ is of a gentle Irish family that has come down to very small
farming. He dreams good, solid and rather Anglo-Saxon dreams of draining
bogs on the sea-coast estates of _Lord Leenane_, whose agent he becomes
(and whose daughter he loves from afar), and of a great port that is to
rival Belfast. Unexpected, not to say incredible, assistance comes from a
Jew money-lender and his wife. The portraits of _Mr._ and _Mrs. Aarons_ are
the best things in the book, and I hope Mrs. HINKSON will make a novel
about these two admirable people some day soon. _Denys_ makes his own and
his patron's fortune and I am sure lives happily ever after with _Dawn_,
who is the palest wraith of a girl, owing to the shameful neglect of her
author, who is too busy putting large sums of money into the pockets of the
principal puppets. Indeed, for a West Coast of Ireland story a demoralising
amount of money is going about.

* * * * *

The principal scenes of _The North Door_ (CONSTABLE) are laid in the
Cornwall of some hundred-and-thirty years ago, and I welcome Dr. GREVILLE
MACDONALD as an expert in the Cornish language and character. Cornwall, as
all readers of fiction know, has during the last few years been attacked
again and again by novelists, and most of them would do well to study Dr.
MACDONALD'S romance and most thoroughly to digest it. In form, however, he
will have little to teach them, for his book is very indifferently
constructed. It may seem ungrateful in these rather skimpy days to complain
of a surfeit of matter, but there is stuff in this book for two if not
three novels. One cannot blame Dr. MACDONALD for his indignation at the
miseries of child-labour, but here it is perhaps out of place. His _Mr.
Trevenna_, the mystical parson, friend of smugglers and of everyone who
suffered from laws (unrighteous or righteous), is a great figure; and I
shall not soon forget either his correspondence with _Lady Evangeline
Walrond_ or his superhuman kindliness of heart. If you want to get at the
true flavour of Corn