The style of the book is admirable.  It is brief almost to abruptness.  The words are few, and are crammed with all the meaning they can hold.  There is not a page which does not show that the writer is an economist of expression, and desirous of conveying his matter with the slightest possible expenditure of ink.  Charles Reade himself does not condense with a more fretful impatience of all circumlocution and a profounder reliance on the absolute import of single words.

We might easily refer to particular scenes from this book, illustrative of the author’s descriptive and representative powers.  Among many which might be noticed, we will allude to only two,—­that in which Cecil is revived from his “sleep of death,” and that in the opera-house, where Byng is apprised of the guilt of Emma Denman.  Nobody can read either without feeling that in the disastrous fight of Great Bethel we lost a great novelist as well as a chivalrous soldier and a noble man.

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