But while the reader quarrels with a waste of precious material, Mr. Blackmore pursues his meditative way, with his smile of genial observation, himself the best of all his personages.  The smell of the heather and the wild moorland odors, the honeyed grass and the fragrant thyme, the darker breathings of the sea, get into his pages and render them fragrant.  A few villages lie on the edge of that wild region, and a living trout stream darts by, but the landscape does not obtrude itself nor interrupt the story.  The quaint philosophy flows on spontaneously, with a tender humanity and cheerful fun.  A writer like this may be pardoned if he is an indifferent builder of a tale.

The scene of ‘Lorna Doone,’ the novelist’s masterpiece, is laid in Devonshire; and what Wordsworth did for the lake country, Blackmore has done for the fairest county in England.  The time is that of Charles II.  The book is historical, it is very long, it is minute in detail, and it is melodramatic:  but it is alive.  The strange adventures may or may not have happened, but we believe in them, for it is real life that is set before us; and whatever the author may tell us of robber caves and black-hearted villains, there is nothing incredible in any of his confidences.  Nothing in recent novel writing is more vivid than the contrast between these outcast nobles the Doones, robbers and brigands, living in the wilds of Bagworthy Forest, locked fast in the hills,—­and the peaceful farm-house of the yeoman Ridd who lives on the Downs.  This home is not idealized.  From the diamond-paned kitchen come savory smells of cooking and substantial fare.  Pretty Annie, whose “like has never been seen for making a man comfortable,” Lizzie, who was undersized and loved books, “but knew the gift of cooking had not been vouchsafed her by God,” the sweet homely mother, and above all the manly figure of the young giant John, make a picture of which the gloomy castle of the Doones is the shadow.  And what more charming than the story of the love that takes possession of the young boy, making a poet, a soldier, a knight of him, through a chance encounter with Lorna, the queen of the wild band, the grandchild of old Sir Ensor Doone?

With John Ridd,—­“Grit Jan”—­the author dwelt till he possessed him with human attributes and made him alive.  Around him the interest of the story centres.  He is full of mother-wit and observation of men and things, especially of every changing mood of the nature he regards as his true mother.  He is brave and resourceful, and rescues Lorna and himself from numberless difficulties by his native shrewdness.  And his love is a poem, an idyl that crowns him a shepherd king in his own green pastures.  Nothing that he does in his plodding, sturdy way wearies us.  His size, his strength, his good farming, the way he digs his sheep out of the snow, entertain us as well as his rescue of Lorna from the clan.

The texture of this novel is close, the composition elaborate.  It is impossible to escape from it, the story having been once begun.  ’Lorna Doone’ is Blackmore at his highest point, full of truest nature and loveliest thoughts.