ment is apt to make the critic unjust. When first the news reached us that Mr Merriman's forthcoming work would deal with the Mutiny, our thought was, "Now we shall have the novel of the Mutiny at last!" But 'Flotsam' has come, and, alas! the novel of the Mutiny has not. This may be-we are inclined to think it must be-the fault of the

plan which the author proposed to himself, the study of a life, with the Mutiny as one of its episodes. But the Mutiny declines to be treated satisfactorily in such spirit, and the result is that the scenes depicting it so overpower the rest of the book that what comes before seems padding, and what comes after anticlimax. And yet it is not a long book—in fact, it is far too short to deal adequately with its great subject. Is it too much to hope that some day Mr Merriman may perceive his error and set to work afresh, recasting this book, if necessary, and expanding it, but devoting all the enthusiasm and information he possesses to a larger and worthier canvas? That he does feel to the full the fascination of that heroic time, we know from such passages as this:

"There are some who would fain wipe the year 1857 out of the British calendar. A year truly of woe and distress and unspeakable horror; a year standing out prominently in great red letters so long as the world shall remember the English race. But we who now look back, standing

our race.

as it were farther down the avenue of time, to those days receding fast into the perspective of history, can scarcely fail to recognise that the Indian Mutiny is a corner-stone of What of Neill and Hodson, of Ewart, of Cooper, who leapt alone through a breach into a stronghold where we killed two thousand; of Adrian Hope, the giant with the gentle smile and the terrible sword; of Nicholson, of Peel,

of Inglis, of the clerk Kavanagh, who between sunset and dawn handed his name down to history; of Taylor, of Gubbins, the dauntless civilians; of Neville Chamberlain; of the thousand and one soldiers and civilians who sprang up, like mushrooms in a meadow, wheresoever the need came? What of these? They were Englishmen, and 1857 told us that we had them. Assuredly we may reflect with pride that 1857 was added to our history, that these men were the contemporaries of our fathers, that

the women who suffered and were strong, that the men who fought, were the fathers and mothers of some of us."

It is possible that a portion of our disappointment with Mr Merriman's book arises out of his choice of a hero. That the novelist who has drawn those magnificent young men Wynyard Mistley and Jack Meredith, and the more solid, but no less satisfying, Guy Oscard and Paul Howard Alexis, should elect to depict as his central figure that hopelessly "good fellow" low" Harry Wylam, no one's enemy but his own, is a fall indeed. The most unkindest cut of all lies in the fact that beside him, to enhance his weaknesses and show up his follies, is placed Fred Marqueray, of the type that Mr Merriman loves. We see too little. of Marqueray to know him well. He glides through the pages "like a native," as poor Harry says, long, thin, inscrutable, a without the passions and frailties of other men. One faux pas he most surprising nature, but it does commit, and that of the seems to have escaped the author's notice. We allude to the fact that when, by means of his expedition into Delhi, he has obtained proof of Lamond's treachery, and actually holds in his hand the

man

document which convicts him of supplying information to the enemy, he takes no steps to prevent a repetition of the crime,

nor even to cause him to be arrested on suspicion, but conceals his knowledge "for the sake of Englishmen,' as Mr Merriman says. That was all very well afterwards; but in the thick of the struggle before Delhi it might have meant the annihilation of the whole British force. Another doubtful point is the excitement displayed by Marqueray when, disguised as a fakir, he succeeds in penetrating into the city. It strikes us as unlikely, to say the least, that a man of such iron nerve and resolution should betray himself to so great an extent as to make even his unsuspecting guides ask him whether he had never been in Delhi before.

Nor is this the whole of our quarrel with Mr Merriman. He has always been devoted to certain mannerisms, and they are growing upon him. He insists too much on the characteristics of his personages. How can we lose ourselves in the story when the author is always at our elbow, making unpleasant personal remarks about the characters ? "You may do your best to believe that these people are real," he says; "but I will teach you that they are merely my puppets. Observe the quiet smile of this man, the flicker of that woman's eyelids, observe them carefully, for they shall be obtruded upon your attention at the most exciting moments of the story, simply to remind you that I am there." But perhaps Mr Merriman's least agreeable characteristic is his habit of carping at women-especially modern women -which strikes the average man as rather smart at first, but soon palls. It is the converse of Maxwell Gray's practice of attacking men, and equally uncalled for. Mr Merriman may say that he only agrees with King Solomon. Setting aside the fact that King

Solomon had enjoyed a considerably larger experience from which to generalise, we hold that it is as inartistic as it is unchivalrous to introduce these Mephistophelean sneers where they have no bearing on the plot. It is with diffidence that we venture to suggest a remedy which was once proved effectual in curing an obsession of somewhat similar character. When Mr Dick, in 'David Copperfield,' found it impossible to keep the head of King Charles the First out of his law-copying, the difficulty was obviated by placing on a sidetable the Memorial in which the unhappy monarch figured so conspicuously, in order that the copyist might simply cross the room and jot down in it any remarks on the subject that presented themselves imperiously to his mind. Has Mr Merriman no early effort-scored, perhaps, by the blue pencil of some unsympathetic editor with the mystic letters D.w.t.-that he could sacrifice in this good cause? He might make it the dumpingground for his cynicism on the subject of woman and of the present day, and thus effectually relieve his mind without spoiling his books.

But if it is a misfortune for an author to find himself doomed to drag the New Woman into all he writes, it is worse than a misfortune for a lady writer to be similarly oppressed by the sex. question. We have just been reading the very latest of the Mutiny novels-Mrs Steel's newly published work, 'On the Face of the Waters'-which has been hailed by a high authority in the pages of a contemporary as the novel of the Mutiny. We have wondered mildly with the village-folk at the strange events which passed, chafed with the British troops in Meerut at their forced inaction on the fatal day when they might have

saved Delhi, agonised with the helpless women and children penned into the great hostile city, and fumed on the Ridge with Nicholson, and yet there is a nasty taste left behind! From this and Mrs Steel's other books we gather that she has a new sexphilosophy of her own, which is to set right the relations between men and women. No doubt she knows what she means, and we hope the new philosophy may do all that it is intended to do, but we must confess that we have never yet been able to see what she is aiming at, and each successive book puzzles us more. At one moment the balance of evidence seems in favour of answering in the affirmative the question of the ladies' papers, "Is Romantic Love an Evil?" and arranging all marriages on common-sense principles. At another we incline to the idea that passion on the part of the man and indifference on that of the woman makes for the greatest happiness of the greatest number; while we think we cannot be mistaken in stating that a purely maternal affection in a woman is the only one likely to lead to the success of a marriage, and that there is no use, nor even advantage, in objecting to any number of "pasts" in a man's life. We may be mistaken in these mutually contradictory deductions—we may be grievously misrepresenting Mrs Steel-but if this is the case, we would humbly beg her to write a kind of guide-book or dictionary, to be used in company with her other works and to interpret them, saying what she really does mean. For it is this obtrusion of the sexproblem, and not the mingling of history and fiction, as she fears, that spoils her book.

To us, who from among the Philistines outside watch Mrs Steel in uncomprehending awe, it

seems as though she must live in a kind of fearful twilight-not a twilight of the gods, by any means, but of fate, peopled with shapes of dread. She has an infinite pity for all suffering things a pity which is only increased when they have sunk too low to pity themselves— and in her twilight she moves about with hushed footsteps, lifting a corner of a veil here, suggesting something there, but revealing -what? Nothing, we say, unless it be a soul of evil in things good. Sometimes, when she forgets herself, she can thrill us as few writers can, and we joy in the stern clash of arms or the greatness of a great man. There is something in life besides the sex-problem, we cry in delight; but turn the page, and hey, presto! we are in the twilight again, and longing to read 'Marmion,' or Macaulay's 'Lays,' or the Marriage Service of the Church of England from beginning to end, or plunge into a ferocious boys' story of pirates and Red Indians, to escape from the clouds about us.

Mrs Steel has had a great chance in this book, but truth compels us to state that in our opinion (no doubt we are oldfashioned) she has missed it. Her idea was an excellent one, and, unlike Mr Merriman, she allowed herself due space in which to work it out. Even now our blood kindles at the thought of certain passages-of the English who live to make mistakes and die to retrieve them; of the one sepoy of the 74th who was true to his salt in the evacuation of the Flagstaff Tower; of the women imprisoned in the palace dungeons who were offered their lives if they would embrace Mohammedanism, and all refused; of the grand figure of Nicholson, pitted against the despairing strength of the rebellion. The pitiful intrigues

of the Mogul Court (it is interesting, by the bye, to learn that in their hours of social converse the queen and her slaves made and appreciated puns in English); the idyl of Abool-Bukr and the gentle Princess Farkhoonda, with its tragic ending; the destruction of the Arsenal; the attack on the Burn Bastion, all these things remain, and yet in spite of them the book is not for all time, but only for an age. The age is not that of 1857, it is that of 1896, nourished on the controversies and discussions of the last four

or five years. The average man did not in 1857 formulate for himself theories on the relation of the sexes in language borrowed from Scandinavia, and some of the words which pass between Kate Erlton and Douglas on their first meeting are sheer impossibilities at the date at which they are supposed to be uttered. An ordinary Englishwoman of 1857, destitute of the advantages to be gained from the study of Ibsen and of Hill-top novelists, would have shrunk from such thoughts, even had they occurred to her, as a deadly sin. It strikes us sometimes sadly enough, on comparing those days with our own, that our present advantages are not all clear gain. Oh, the pity of it, when we have got rid of so many of the old bogeys of conventionality which darkened the lives of women, to raise up another-this brooding horror of the sex-problem -to overshadow them again!

In this matter of tone, by the way, an excellent corrective to Mrs Steel's book is to be found in H. C. Irwin's (the sex of the author is not indicated on the title-page) A Man of Honour,' which, curiously enough, deals also with the siege of Delhi, although the Mutiny serves only as the climax to a story of Indian

frontier life. It is true that some readers might be inclined to call certain of the earlier chapters dull, and that the narrative as a whole is too obviously put together, and does not flow. But a cleaner book, and one more free from the trail of the sex-serpent, in spite of its motif, we scarcely remember to have read-indeed, its chief drawback is that the hero is somewhat too bright and good for human nature's daily food, and that the reason for his great sacrifice appears to coarser minds a little inadequate. But if, as it seems, 'A Man of Honour' is a first book, it is full of promise, and displays a knowledge of life at the edge of the empire which ought to be turned to good account in the future. If we might venture to offer a word of advice to the author, we would say this: Be more careful on another occasion to work in your information with your story, instead of presenting the two elements in alternate patches, and do not again endow your hero so richly with all the cardinal virtues as to leave none over for your heroine; but do not lose hold of your idealism, for we need more such idealists as you. We can learn all that we desire of the wickedness of the world from the fiction of the day; be it yours to show us some of the good that is left in it. Better Jim Purefoy dying in the Tarai jungle, happy in the idea that he had effected the capture of the Nana, than Jim Douglas linking his damaged heart either for pity or for no particular reason, apparently with the battered affections, such as they were, of Kate Erlton.

From these remarks it will be clear that, pace Mr Lockwood Kipling and the New Review,' we feel that the novel of the Mutiny is still to be written.