and leisurely utterances, he would have more time to bestow on really exciting and dramatic episodes, instead of going off into a little corner and carefully embellishing it, while the denouement waits and the interest grows cold.  Neither can he write a page without sending a sly bolt of amused perception through it, in which he discovers some foible or pricks some bubble of pretension, but always tenderly, as if he loved his victim.  To the fact that Mr. Blackmore’s success came late in life, we have perhaps to be thankful for the softened and indulgent maturity which finds a hundred excuses, and knows that nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.

[Illustration:  R.D.  BLACKMORE.]

The best expression of his genius in the delineation of character is not—­with perhaps the exception of John Ridd—­in his heroes and heroines.  The former are drawn with the stronger hand.  The maidens are pretty girls, sweet and good and brave for the sake of their fathers, and cunning for their lovers.  His young men are gallant and true; but as exemplary love is apt to run smooth, it is not here that the drama finds the necessary amount of difficulty and pain.  The interest centres in such delicious conceptions as Parson Short, full of muscular energy and sound doctrine, in Dr. Uperandown, his salt-water parish rival, the carrier Cripps, Parson Chowne, and the renowned highwayman Tom Faggus, 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.