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though the story is beautiful enough and its execution on the whole well worthy of a master's hand, yet it bears patent signs of haste and careless manipulation, and, in spite of the cobbling and tinkering that it had during its subsequent editions there are plenty of oversights that are surprising in the careful author of Krishna Kanta's Will. Redundance too, is not one of the vices from which our author has taken special care to defend himself in this work; situations again are introduced which want explanation and which are inconsistent with previous statements. The absurd idea of Santi riding a horse with sari on is perhaps the crowning point of that epidemic of slips which seems to have taken hold of our author in this work.
The fact is that in this work our author was overwhelmed with the teaching he sought to impart and had very little attention to spare for the perfection of the details. The story therefore has very much the appearance of a noble figure, rough-hewn. All through the narration we notice the breathless haste of the author.—They story runs and with it tuns our author's language, and he is in a desperate hurry to rush it on and finish. The work therefore partakes very largely of the nature of a parable, and as a parable of patriotism it has to be read in order to appreciate its depth of observation and intensity of feeling.
Even as a parable it has to be viewed from the point of view of feeling rather than of conception. For the type of patriotism which our author has here depicted is certainly not the richest in conception nor well worthy of emulation. It is its intensity in feeling and its richness in self-sacrifice that ought to commend it to all right-thinking people. The reader must however be warned against taking the parable
