Mr. Thompson on his title-page announces himself as the author of two novels, "A Tallahassee Girl" and "His Second Campaign," both of which we read with pleasure, and this impression led us to turn hopefully to a third by the same hand. "At Love's Extremes" does not, however, take our fancy. If the author undertook to discuss a complex problem seriously, he has failed to make it clear or vital to the reader; and if the various episodes of Colonel Reynolds's life are to be passed over as mere slight deviations from the commonplace, we can only say that we consider them too unpleasant and abhorrent to good taste to be imposed upon us so lightly. There are also points of the story which seem to mock the good sense of the reader. Has the author considered the state of mind of a young widow who has heard that her husband has been murdered in a street-brawl in Texas, who has mourned him for years, and then, after yielding to the solicitations of a new suitor and promising to marry him, learns from his own lips that it was his hand (although the act was one of self-defence) which sent her husband to his tragic death? Mr. Thompson seems to violate the sanctities and the proprieties of womanhood in allowing the widow, after a faint interval of shock, to pass over this fact as unimportant. This situation has, of course, its famous precedent in the scene in which Gloster wooes and wins the Lady Anne beside her murdered husband's bier; but that is tragedy, and we moderns are, besides, more squeamish than the people of those mediæval times. In this story the situation becomes more logical, even if more absurd, after the return of the husband who was supposed to have been murdered. With a good deal of effort to show powerful feeling, the characters in the book are all automatons, who say and do nothing with real thought or real passion. The vernacular of the mountaineers seems to have been carefully studied, and is so thoroughly outlandish and so devoid of fine expressions that we are inclined to believe it more accurate than the poetic and musical dialects which it is the fashion to impose upon our credulity. But it must be confessed that, with only his own rude and pointless _patois_ in which to express himself, the Southern cracker becomes painfully devoid of interest, to say nothing of charm. FOOTNOTES. [001] John Sevier's Memorial to the North Carolina Legislature. [002] J.G.M. Ramsay, "Annals of Tennessee." [003] Haywood. * * * * * End of Project Gutenberg's Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885, by Various