silently down and end all without further pain or question. Still, a wide survey of human action and motive must accompany real tragedy; and in the case of Henry Vane the feelings have been too feebly touched for the reader to feel more than shocked and a little impatient at his final act. It is evident, from the author's linking his hero's grievous disaster to the incident of losing one and breaking another of his shirt-studs, that he has never heard the story of a man who committed suicide while engaged at his toilet, first writing on a slip of paper and appending it to his clothes, "Tired of buttoning and unbuttoning."
There is just sufficient scientific evidence of the possibility of a condition of alternate states of consciousness to prevent "Archibald Malmaison's" being too palpably absurd a fiction of the author's imagination. And, having conceded so much, nobody need dispute the fact that Mr. Julian Hawthorne has written a powerful story, almost the more striking from the fact that it shows the marks of having been hastily thrown off while the author was at a white heat, his mind under the domination of one idea. With so grotesque a subject there was much that was better left to be dimly hinted at, for certain horrors seen in an intermittent flicker of twilight shadows move the imagination more than if they were clearly indicated. We will not mar the story by a pointless and misleading recital of its incidents, but advise the reader who loves a sensation to go to the book itself, which may be read with wonder and horror to its last line. And of how many books can that be said?
Mr. Oliphant's "Piccadilly" is very readable and bright in its way, although not equal to his "Altiora Peto" or "Irene Macgillicuddy,"—which set the fashion for the frivolous book of the period, where the ideas, follies, and worldlinesses of the times are supposed to be shown up with some gentle satire and much engaging cleverness. Mr. Oliphant's books rather suggest studies for novels than are novels themselves. He has ample material, but does not assort, blend, and finally arrange it with a view to producing a clear effect. His plot, such as it is, moves on in a whirlwind of devices and caprices. He sees his end, no doubt, himself, and flies to attain it with a hop, skip, and jump, indifferent, apparently, as to whether the reader can follow him or not. He is, in fact, too clever by half; and his books suffer the disadvantage of being thrown together without those toilsome processes which make the characters and story live before the writer and thus gain a deep hold on the sympathies of the reader. His present study of Lady Broadhem ought to be far more interesting than it is. A brilliant and ambitious woman controlling her world, immersed in financial operations which keep her in feverish dependence upon news of the stock-operations in the city, sub-letting houses to rich parvenus with the promise of gaining their admission into exclusive sets, she is well sketched and felicitously shown off. But, from the absence of those careful touches which enable the reader to realize a character like hers, she remains simply a clever sketch instead of becoming a vivid and effective personage. The book abounds in lively suggestions and what is called epigram.
We fear that Mr. Edgar Fawcett will lose more than a leaf from the garland of laurels he has gained of late by a production so crude, so ill written, and so distinctly displeasing as "Tinkling Cymbals." His effects have been hitherto gained by the bold drawing and exaggerated lights and shadows which belong to scene-painting rather than to high art; but he has generally displayed a preference for subjects which aroused interest and sympathy. Not so in his present book, where—possibly with the exception of Mrs. Romilly—we meet a set of people from whom in actual life we should flee, and who in a book possess but this one virtue, that they may be still more easily dismissed by throwing the volume out of sight. If the author's object were caricature, there is so lamentable an absence of humor in the scenes where a canting minister and his circle of worshippers are introduced that his caricature is a signal failure. His heroine is quite as lively an instance of "sounding brass" as the Rev. Dr. Pragley himself, and, liberal as have been the concessions to modern heroines in the way of enabling them to dismiss pleasing traditions, we must venture to suggest that in the case of Miss Leah Romilly the final limit has been reached. Mr. Fawcett seems anxious, too, to show us that Newport is not altogether the paradise that his contemporary novelists have made it out to be. He throws a blighting eclipse over its gayety and proves it to be not only vulgar but tiresome. The general dreariness of effect is unfortunate, for it would require satire of the keenest and a story of
