haracter is of the richest promise for future stories,
in which I hope the author will give us more pictures of the land he
understands so well.

* * * * *

I certainly admit that the publishers of _The Strangeness of Noel
Carton_ (JENKINS) have every justification for speaking of it as "a
new note in a novel." Indeed that clever writer, Mr. WILLIAM CAINE,
has here sounded as new, original and (for all its surface humour)
horrible a note as any I have heard in fiction for some time. My
trouble is that I can hardly indicate it without giving away the
whole business. Very briefly the tale is of one _Noel Carton_, who has
married beneath him for not quite enough money to gild a detestable
union, and, being an unstable egoist and waster, presently seeks
consolation (and pocket money) by writing a novel founded in part on
his own position. One may note in passing that Mr. CAINE seems to have
but a modest idea of the mental equipment required for such a task.
Still I suppose he knows, and anyway that isn't the point. The point
is that, once _Noel_ has got himself properly projected into his
novel, all sorts of the queerest and most bogie coincidences begin to
occur. Again to quote the puff preliminary, "as the book develops the
reader has a suspicion which becomes almost a certainty, until the
great and astounding climax is reached;" concerning which you may
justly remark that no reader with a certainty would regard its
verification as "astounding." But this takes nothing from the craft
with which, on looking back, you see the climax to have been prepared.
I could hardly call the tale altogether pleasant, but it is undeniably
new and vastly original.

* * * * *

The good Sioux glories in his scalps, and Mr. ISAAC F. MARCOSSON,
of Louisville, must surely be the Great Chief of interviewers.
Interviewing, he tells us, is, after all, only a form of reporting,
and so are history, poetry and romance. What, he asks, were MOMMSEN
and GIBBON, WORDSWORTH and KEATS but reporters, and I can only answer,
What indeed? To have been found worthy of tonsure by Mr. MARCOSSON it
is necessary to be very eminent, and to win his highest praise it
is essential also to be a good "imparter," though he has a kind of
sneaking admiration for the paleface who insists on handing him a
written statement and declines to speak. Such a one was Sir EDWARD
CARSON. Hanging to Mr. MARCOSSON'S gird