ingenious plot which helped us to forget the tedium of a railway
journey, I do not know that there is a copy on our shelves.
Certainly it is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and
The Mayor of Casterbridge. But some of us venture to think that in
that admirable historical romance which moves with such firm foot
through both the troubled England and the mysterious Italy of the
seventeenth century, Mr. Shorthouse won a certain place in English
literature.

When people are raving between the soup and fish about some popular
novel which to-morrow will be forgotten, but which doubtless, like
the moths which make beautiful the summer-time, has its purpose in
the world of speech, it gives one bookman whom I know the keenest
pleasure to ask his fair companion whether she has read Mark
Rutherford. He is proudly conscious at the time that he is a witness
to perfection in a gay world which is content with excitement, and he
would be more than human if he had not in him a touch of the literary
Pharisee. She has NOT read Mark Rutherford, and he does not advise
her to seek it at the circulating library, because it will not be
there, and if she got it she would never read more than ten pages.
Twenty thousand people will greedily read Twice Murdered and Once
Hung and no doubt they have their reward, while only twenty people
read Mark Rutherford; but then the multitude do not return to Twice
Murdered, while the twenty turn again and again to Mark Rutherford
for its strong thinking and its pure sinewy English style. And the
children of the twenty thousand will not know Twice Murdered, but the
children of the twenty, with others added to them, will know and love
Mark Rutherford. Mr. Augustine Birrell makes it, I think, a point of
friendship that a man should love George Borrow, whom I think to
appreciate is an excellent but an acquired taste; there are others