of whom they were immensely proud. These people, before he has done with
them, get hold of our sympathies, while the author keeps perennially
fresh his enjoyment of human follies. His rustics do not talk with
elaborate humor, nor are they amiable, but they are racy of the soil.

One cannot dismiss a novelist without a reference to his plots, unless
indeed he discards plots as an article of faith. Mr. Blackmore has no
such intention. His stories are full of adventure and dramatic
situations, and his melodrama is of the lurid kind on which the calcium
light is thrown. Sometimes, as in 'The Maid of Sker' and 'Cripps' they
violate every probability. In others, as in 'Mary Anerley,' the mystery
is childishly simple, the oft-repeated plot of a lost child recovered by
certain strangely wrought gold buttons. In 'Erema,' the narrative
suffers for want of vraisemblance, and loses by being related by a very
young girl who has had no opportunity of becoming familiar with the
world she describes. He is constantly guilty of that splendid mendacity
which fiction loves, but which is nearly impossible to actual life.
Self-sacrifice as depicted in 'Christowell,' involving much suffering to
little purpose, is unsatisfactory; and it is a sin against the verities
to make unreasonable generosity the basis of fiction representing life.

But while the reader quarrels with a waste of precious material, Mr.
Blackmore pursues his meditative way, with his smile of genial
observation, himself the best of all his personages. The smell of the
heather and the wild moorland odors, the honeyed grass and the fragrant
thyme, the darker breathings of the sea, get into his pages and render
them fragrant. A few villages lie on the edge of that wild region, and
a living trout stream darts by, but the landscape does not obtrude
itself nor interrupt the story. The quaint philosophy flows on
spontaneously, with a tender humanity and cheerful fun. A writer like
this may be pardoned if he is an indifferent builder of a tale.

The scene of 'Lorna Doone,' the novelist's masterpiece, is laid in
Devonshire; and what Wordsworth did for the lake country, Blackmore has
done for the fairest county in England. The time is that of Charles II.
The book is historical, it is very long, it is minute in detail, and it
is melodramatic: but it is alive. The strange adventures may or may not
have happened, but we believe in them, for it is real life that is set
before us; and what