Chapter 4

BARONESS ORCZY is to be congratulated on a distinctly ingenious idea. Searching about her, no doubt, for a successor to the famous _Pimpernel_, her attention was caught by a certain picture in the WALLACE Collection, a picture everyone knows and admires for its rollicking and adventurous high spirits. "Capital!" said she (as I imagine it); "why not trace back the line of _Blakeney_, and make the subject of this picture the ancestor from whom he inherited his endearing qualities?" _The Laughing Cavalier_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is the result. Having thus divined the origin of the hero, I feel that any further indication of his character would be almost superfluous. You will certainly not find this new _Blakeney_ unworthy of his house. It is perhaps something of a surprise to find him a mercenary in seventeenth-century Holland; but the old touch is there. Thus, having been hired by a gang of conspirators to abduct the sister of one of them, who has overheard their plans for the slaying of the Stadtholder, and keep her prisoner till the deed be done, what more _Blakeneyish_ than that he should recognise in his captive the particular object of his affections? or that, having abducted the girl according to instructions received, he should presently be offered untold gold by her distracted parent for her discovery and return. A faintly embarrassing situation this, even for an ancestor of the elusive _Pimpernel_. How he manages to turn it all to favour and romance you must allow Baroness ORCZY to tell you herself. Incidentally, the appearance of the book at this particular moment, and in spite (so the publishers inform me on a slip) of the author's first resolve to postpone it, proves her to possess something of the sporting spirit of her creation. Hero's luck to them both!

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A novelist creating a novelist-hero is on dangerous ground. If he be a little less than perfectly sincere he runs risk of being pretentious, fatuous even. But sincerity is just Mr. CHARLES MARRIOTT'S conspicuous quality, and here in _The Unpetitioned Heavens_ (HUTCHINSON) it commands a dexterous and fastidious workmanship. You'll find, if you read a scene over again, that there's more, not less, in it than you thought. Mr. MARRIOTT makes his characters alive by realisation of their subtleties rather than of their obviousnesses, and that's a feat to which I doff my beaver. The main theme, sensitively felt and developed, is a delicate one--the love of a middle-aged woman for a man who is rapt in worship at a distance of a younger woman, the other's friend. The manoeuvring of the elder, which might easily have been vulgarised on the one hand or devitalised on the other, just remains refreshingly and believably human. Mr. MARRIOTT'S story is not a yarn, but a brocade of intricate design and exquisite colouring. Let justice be done and _The Unpetitioned Heavens_ fall to a wide circle of perceptive readers.

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Illustration: _Amateur Constable_ (_Policeman's son_). "I ARREST YER ON SUSPICION O' STEALIN' A RESERVOIR. ANY 'OLLERIN' 'LL BE TOOK DAHN AGIN YER."

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THE PATRIOT.

"At Monday's meeting, Mr. H. H. Gibbs, J. P., the Chairman, expressed the opinion that the town should not be so conspicuous at night, as in the event of a Zeppelin raid Bognor might be mistaken for Portsmouth."--_Southern Weekly News._

It would be small consolation to England, if Bognor Cinema Palace fell, that Portsmouth Dockyard had been saved.

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