Rodney Stone

“Rodney Stone” is a rattling good novel, and we use the phrase advisedly as conveying a better notion of the book’s excellent qualities than might be given by some more elaborate and courtly turn of language. The pages are full of life, and this is the more remarkable because Dr. Conan Doyle has chosen a period which is for novelistic purposes at once dangerously near to, and far from, the present day. When George IV. was Prince of Wales and the prize-ring had not yet become corrupt, human emotions were no doubt not very different from what they were, are, and will be, but the fashion of expressing them was peculiar to a transitional time, in which greatness and littleness jostled one another in a manner curious enough, and curiously noted and caught by Mr. Doyle.