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.
The journey was a great deal longer to fetch around the southern hills, and enter by the Doone gate, than to cross the lower land and steal in by the water-slide. However, I durst not take a horse (for fear of the Doones, who might be abroad upon their usual business), but started betimes in the evening, so as not to hurry, or waste any strength upon the way. And thus I came to the robbers' highway, walking circumspectly, scanning the sky-line of every hill, and searching the folds of every valley, for any moving figure.
Although it was now well on toward dark, and the sun was down an hour or so, I could see the robbers' road before me, in a trough of the winding hills, where the brook plowed down from the higher barrows, and the coving banks were roofed with furze. At present there was no one passing, neither post nor sentinel, so far as I could descry; but I thought it safer to wait a little, as twilight melted into night; and then I crept down a seam of the highland, and stood upon the Doone track.
As the road approached the entrance, it became more straight and strong, like a channel cut from rock, with the water brawling darkly along the naked side of it. Not a tree or bush was left, to shelter a man from bullets; all was stern, and stiff, and rugged, as I could not help perceiving, even through the darkness: and a smell as of churchyard mold, a sense of being boxed in and cooped, made me long to be out again.