r as we know, is the only quality in his writing
which makes him _litterateur_ at all. But Heaven, which has denied
him many gifts, has given him one in full measure,--the gift of
Defoe, the power of so stating things that the reader not only
believes them, but sees them in bodily presence, that he is there
wherever the author chooses to place him, under the blue tent,
careering over the black ice of Lake Baikal, or hobnobbing in tea
with priests as unlike Englishmen as it is possible for human
beings to be, yet, such is his art, in nowise unintelligible or
strange. It may be, as we have said, that it is an individual
impression, but we never read, save once, the kind of book in our
lives, did not deem it possible ever again to meet with this
special variety of unconscious literary skill. We are aware of a
dozen shortcomings, of a hundred points upon which Mr. Gilmour
ought to have given light, and has not; but there has been, if our
experience serves us at all, no book quite like this book since
_Robinson Crusoe_; and _Robinson Crusoe_ is not better, does not
tell a story more directly, or produce more instantaneous and final
conviction. Heaven help us all, if Mr. Gilmour tells us that he has
met any unknown race in Mongolia, say, people with the power of
making themselves invisible, for Tyndall will believe him, and
Huxley account for them, and the _Illustrated London News_ publish
their portraits--in the stage of invisibility. We do not say the
book is admirable, or perfect, or anything else superlative; but we
do say, and this with sure confidence, that no one who begins it
will leave it till the narrative ends, or doubt for an instant,
whether he knows Defoe or not, that he has been enchained by
something separate and distinct in literature, something almost
uncanny in the way it has gripped him, and made him see for ever a
scene he never expected to see.

'We do not know that we have any more to say about the book. Its
merit is that, and no other; and we do not suppose anybody ever
proved _Robinson Crusoe's_ value by extracts. But we must say a
word or two about the author and his subject. Mr. Gilmour, though a
Scotchman, is apparently attached to the London Mission, and seems
to have quitted Peking for Mongolia on an impulse to teach Christ