It is not often that such a sound and yet readable English novel is republished in America.
The due mean between flashiness and dulness is hard to be attained, but we have it here.
There is neither a prosy page nor a sensational chapter in it.
It is a nice book for a clean hearth and an easy chair.
It is a natural, healthy book, written by a living person, about people of flesh and blood, who might have been our neighbors, and of events, which might happen to anybody. This is a great charm in a novel. This leaves a clean taste in the mouth, and a delicious memory of the feast.
The tone of it is high and true, without being obtrusively good. Such a book is as great a relief amid the sensational stories of the day, as a quiet little bit of "still life" is to the eye, after being blinded by the glaring colors of the French school.
This novel reproduces that exquisite tone or flavor so hard to express which permeates true English country life, and gives to it a peculiar charm unlike any other, which one having once seen and felt, lives as it were under a spell, and would never willingly allow to fade from their memory.
Too much cannot be said in praise of Simplicity and Fascination.
