Miss Mary Wilkins, who is a very much younger writer than any of the three here dealt with, reminds an English reader both of George Eliot and Miss Mitford. ‘Pembroke’ is the best and completest of her books. So far as pure literary charm goes it would be difficult to amend her work, but the suggestion of character conveyed is surely too acidulated. Such a set of stubborn, self-willed, and uncomfortable people as are gathered together in these pages could hardly have lived in any single village in any quarter of the world. They are drawn with an air of truth which is not easy to resist, but if they are really as accurately studied as they seem to be Pembroke must be a place to fly from. It is conceivable that the members of such a congregation might be less intolerable to each other than they seem to the foreign outsider, but the ameliorating effects of usage must needs be strong indeed to make them fit to live with. For the most part they are represented as well-meaning folk; but they are exasperatingly individual, all over sore corners, eager to be injured at their tenderest points, and implacable to the person who hurts them. In Pembroke a soreness of egotism afflicts everybody. Every creature in the book is over-sensitive to slight and misunderstanding, and every creature is clumsy and careless in the infliction of pain. It is a study in self-centred egotism. People who have an opportunity of knowing village life in the Eastern States proclaim the book a masterpiece of observation.