foreign
intrigue. Kingsley's skill lay chiefly in his portrayal of men,
especially of young men, such as the dashing Charles Ravenshoe and his
philosophic friend Marston (a study of the George Warrington type);
Lord Welter, Lieutenant Hillyar, and Colonel Tom Silcote, reckless
profligates, but likeable fellows all; Frank Maberly, the athletic
curate; and Sam Buckley, the type of an Australian country gentleman.
With old men he was less successful. Lord Saltire, the placid
good-natured cynic of _Ravenshoe_, is, however, a clever exception. 'All
old women are beautiful,' says Kingsley in one of his stories, and he
never portrayed one that was not. His best are Miss Thornton and Lady
Ascot. The younger women, excepting Mary Hawker and Adelaide Summers,
are rather slightly drawn. Even Alice Brentwood is a somewhat indistinct
personage compared with the Australian girls of Mrs. Campbell Praed and
Ada Cambridge.

The superior position usually accorded to _Ravenshoe_ among Kingsley's
novels is merited more by the soundness of its plot than by the
naturalness of its characters. It was the author's first essay in pure
romance, and, with Henry Kingsley, to build character from imagination
was always largely, sometimes extravagantly, to idealise. He loved to
people old country houses with walking mysteries, to unravel tangled
genealogies, and discover secrets of youthful folly, to apportion
property to rightful heirs, and endow his characters with a superhuman
generosity. When Charles Ravenshoe is recovering from the long illness
which terminates the full series of his misfortunes, he sends for
Welter, the man who might be considered his arch-enemy, who not so long
before that had seduced Charles's sister and stole his _fiancee_.
Ravenshoe is represented as forgetting all his newly-suffered wrongs,
and thinking only of Welter as his favourite schoolfellow and youthful
companion. Anticipating doubts as to the feasibility of this, the author
proceeds to discuss the point with the reader, as he does in many
similar instances throughout the story. He appears to have a constant
anxiety about the impression he is making, and his comments and
confidences certainly become distasteful. But this foible goes only a
small way to discount the sterling merits of the novel.

ADA CAMBRIDGE.

Towards the close of 1890 the Australian booksellers--a cautious,
conservative class in their attitude towards new fiction, especially
that prod