4–21092.
Descriptive note in December, 1905.
“Opinions may differ as to some of the author’s conclusions, but they give in concise form material which is practically unobtainable elsewhere in so small a compass, and the book will be found useful. A defect which might be remedied in future editions is the absence of a bibliography.”
| + − | Acad. 72: 65. Ja. 19, ’07. 70w. |
Newbolt, Henry John. The old country: a romance. †$1.50. Dutton.
“The story begins at the present time, and suddenly shifts to the year in which the battle of Poictiers was fought, The characters for the most part remain the same, nor does the scene change. Stephen Bulmer, in the early chapters, is a young Englishman, of Colonial upbringing, who ‘speaks of things to come as if he saw them.’ In the later chapters, he is the same Englishman, modified by an Italian education. But the sense of time has vanished from his brain.” (Acad.) “He is taken into ‘the backwoods of time,’ where ‘the real work of men was going forward, with sweat of the brow and blistering of hands, with action and agony and endurance in place of talk and speculation.’ He sees that all his doubts are long descended, that Ralph Tremur, the eternal dissident, is an image of himself, and that the future must lie with the constructive minds, who serve under discipline and keep close to the earth in their toil.” (Spec.)
“Ingenious as is Mr. Newbolt’s thesis, it is not for that that we would most highly praise his book. The story is told with a tact and delicacy rarely found in the modern novel.”
| + + | Acad. 71: 465. N. 10, ’06. 810w. |
“In his dedicatory epistle he frankly acknowledges that he has a purpose and we as frankly state our conviction that that purpose is wrong. Nor can we commend the machinery of the novel.”