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. But while the reader quarrels with a waste of precious material, Mr. Blackmore pursues his meditative way, with his smile of genial observation, himself the best of all his personages. The smell of the heather and the wild moorland odors, the honeyed grass and the fragrant thyme, the darker breathings of the sea, get into his pages and render them fragrant. A few villages lie on the edge of that wild region, and a living trout stream darts by, but the landscape does not obtrude itself nor interrupt the story. The quaint philosophy flows on spontaneously, with a tender humanity and cheerful fun. A writer like this may be pardoned if he is an indifferent builder of a tale.