"JUDITH PARIS"

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1932, Page 17

"JUDITH PARIS"

HUGH WALPOLE'S

TRILOGY

Hugh Walpole is a strong supporter of the long, not to say very long, novel. "Eoguo Herrics" was the first of his trilogy. ]S Tow comes "Judith Paris," running into over 750 pages, but many readers will say that they cannot have too much of a good thing. To have' read "Rogue Merries" first is an advantage, but "Judith Paris" stands alone. It is written with Mr. Walpole's usual power and literary technique, and it embraces not only a huge chronicle of the Herries family, but a great procession of scenes, in which Mr. Walpole-'s historical sense is displayed —London, eighteenth-century Cheapside, a ball of the period, the public hanging of a poor country lad •for stealing three shillings, Paris in post-Revolution days, and bear-baiting in England.

The scenes are laid chiefly in Cumberland in the. eighteenth century, and we get some vivid pictures of those rude and coarso and dirty days when even in the houses of the great bathrooms appear to have been overlooked. Having taken the Lake country for the groundwork of his book tho author is enabled to introduce to its pages some of the men famous in literature, such as his beloved Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Samuel Rogers, "William Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge, and Macaulay, in which characteristic little sketches are given of these great ones. The chief character, of course, is Judith Paris, a little, vital, courageous, honest, red-haired creature, who combines in her. person the solid English qualities of the best of the Herries strain, ■with the imagination and independence of her mother's race. The characters of the numerous members of tho Herries family aro sketched vividly, with their joys and sorrows, loves and hates, intrigues and ambitions. Tragedy and failure in this huge family chronicleare more obvious than happiness and success; but the Herries strain is indomitable and pursues its determined ■way, through all vicissitudes.

Mr. Walpolo is already at work on tho third volume of this trilogy. It ■will be issued in about a year's time, probably under the title of "The Fortress."