In part the actual narrative is well conducted. Johnnie's relations to Charles I., and especially his share in that strange adventure when the King was terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, are told with a good deal of dramatic skill. So, too, his own trial, the murder of his brother by the Italian, his visits to the household of the Ferrars at Little Gidding, and some of the events in Italy--these in themselves are sufficient to make a novel of unusual interest. On the human side, where the emotions are of a dreamy, half-mystical sort, the work is equally successful; in its own kind the love of Inglesant and Mary Collet is beautiful beyond the common love of man and woman. But the novel fails, it must be acknowledged, in the expression of the more ordinary motives of human activity. Johnnie's ingrained obedience to the Jesuit is one of the mainsprings of the plot, yet there is nothing in the story to make this exaggerated devotion seem natural. In the same way Johnnie's attachment to his worldly brother is unexplained by the author, and sounds fantastic. A considerable portion of the book is taken up with Inglesant's search for his brother's murderer, and here again the vacillating desire of vengeance is a false note which no amount of exposition on the part of the author makes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's hero burns for revenge one day, and on the next is oblivious of his passion, in a way that simply leaves the reader in a state of bewilderment. Curiously enough, it was one of the incidents in this hide-and-seek portion of the story, found by Mr. Shorthouse in "a well-known guide-book," that actually suggested the novel to him. For my own part, the sustained charm of the language, a style midway, as it were, between that of Thackeray and that of Hawthorne, not quite so negligently graceful as the former nor quite so deliberate as the latter, yet mingling the elements of both in a happy compound--the language alone, I say, would be sufficient to carry me through these inadequately conceived parts of the story. But I can understand, nevertheless, how in the course of time this feebleness of the purely human motives may gradually deprive the book of readers, for it is the human that abides unchanged, after all, and the divine that alters in form with the passing ages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is better equipped for the future; his novels are not concerned with phases of religion, but with the moral consciousness and the feeling of guilt, which are eternally the same.