Seven Tempest
By $2.75 MACMILLAN
THE first of Mr. Wilkins’s novels to be published in the United States, And So — Victoria, prompted half of its reviewers to compare the author with Dickens and the other half with Dumas. If a comparison we must have, an even more swiftly illuminating one clamors to be made.Seven Tempest and its predecessor, along with their little of what Dickens had, — and that little chiefly in the domain of mannerism, — exhibit nearly every essential quality to be found in another Victorian who was a master of romantic melodrama. Mr. Wilkins’s inventions are not only high-powered Charles Reade, but each of them actually concentrates the whole repertoire of potent tricks that Reade spread over works so variegated as Hard Cash, Peg Woffington, and The Cloister and the Hearth. This is to say that the entertainment is, in its escapist kind, unflagging and superb. Its nucleus is the fantastic love story of an English commoner and a royally connected girl with an extreme disrelish for being used as a pawn by that implacable marriage broker, Leopold of Belgium. W. F.