_EIGHTIETH THOUSAND._
"Mrs. Henry Wood certainly possesses in a wholly exceptional degree the
power of uniting the most startling incident of supernatural influence
with a certain probability and naturalness which compels the most
critical and sceptical reader, having once begun, to go on reading....
He finds himself conciliated by some bit of quiet picture, some accent
of poetic tenderness, some sweet domestic touch telling of a heart
exercised in the rarer experiences; and as he proceeds he wonders more
and more at the manner in which the mystery, the criminality, the
plotting, and the murdering reconciles itself with a quiet sense of the
justice of things; and a great moral lesson is, after all, found to lie
in the heart of all the turmoil and exciting scene-shifting. It is this
which has earned for Mrs. Wood so high a place among popular novelists,
and secured her admittance to homes from which the sensational novelists
so-called are excluded."--THE NONCONFORMIST.
10.