N JESSE'S
novel, this hidden motive was love of the old farm-house hall of
Cloom, and a wish to hand it on, richer, to his son. _Ishmael_
inherited Cloom himself because, though the youngest of a large
family, he was the only one born in wedlock. Hence the second theme of
the story, the jealousy between _Ishmael_ and _Archelaus_, the elder
illegitimate brother. How, through the long lives of both, this
enmity is kept up, and the frightful vengeance that ends it, make an
absorbing and powerful story. The pictures of Cornish farm-life also
are admirably done--though I feel bound to repeat my conviction that
the time is at hand when, for their own interest, our novelists will
have to proclaim what one might call a close time for pilchards.
Still, Miss JESSE has written an unusually clever book, full of
vigour and passion, of which the interest never flags throughout the
five-hundred-odd closely-printed pages that carry its protagonists
from the early sixties almost to the present day. No small
achievement.

* * * * *

Mrs. SKRINE has collected some charming fragrant papers from various
distinguished sources concerning the ever-recurring phenomenon of
_The Devout Lady_ (CONSTABLE), in order to inspire one JOAN, a V.A.D.
heroine of the new order. I guess JOAN, of whom only a faint glimpse
is vouchsafed, must be a nice person--the author's affectionate
interest in her is sufficient proof of that. I suppose we all know
our Little Gidding out of SHORTHOUSE'S _John Inglesant_. Mrs. SKRINE
deprecates the Inglesantian view and offers us a stricter portrait of
MARY COLLET. "Madam" THORNTON, Yorkshire Royalist dame in the stormy
days of the Irish Rebellion and the Second JAMES'S flight to St.
Germain, is another portrait in the gallery; then there's PATTY MORE,
HANNAH'S less famous practical sister, of Barleywood and the Cheddar
Cliff collieries; and a modern great lady of a lowly cottage, in
receipt of an old-age pension and still alive in some dear corner of
England--the best sketch of the series, because drawn from life and
not from documents. If the author has a fault it is her detached
allusiveness, her flattering but mystifying assumption that one can
follow all her references, and her rather mannered idiom: "He proved a
kind husband, but sadly a tiresome." These, however, be trifles. Read
this pleasant book, I beg you, and send it on to your own Joan.

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