TALES.—The Goldsmith's Ward. By Mrs. R. H. Resale. (Chap- man
and Hall.)—This story is chiefly concerned with the love- affairs of Elizabeth Woodville, wife firstly of Sir John Grey, and secondly of King Edward IV. Plenty of matter is, of course, supplied by the War of the Roses, though we have to be thankful to Mrs. Reade that there is not as much bloodshed as there might have been. There has been some effort to keep up a style which may be more or less suited to the time of the tale. We have "be," for instance, instead of " is " and "are," and " ye " for "you," even when the grammar demands the latter. Surely a little study of the English, say of the Bible, would show that " ye " is not an objective form. The book has some merit, but it is over-long. The one volume would make three of the kind commonly used for this class of literature.—The Weird of Deadly Hollow. By Bertram Nutford. (Sutton and Drowley.)—The Cape Colony, for this story is a tale of that country, can rival, it would seem, the most ghost-haunted region of Europe or Asia, when we come to compare horrors. Any one who likes the sensation of having his blood curdled, and who is satisfied when at the end of a tale everything has, so to speak, gone wrong, will find The Weird of Deadly Hollow to his taste. —Life yet Not Life. By William Wakefield. (Eden, Remington, and Co.)—Mr. Wake- field transports us to India, and describes various scenes of life in that country, mingling seria ludo, a story of the Mutiny, for instance, and a graphic account of the proceedings at a "selling lottery," which, we may as well explain, has something to do with horse-racing. An account of the races follows, and then we come into the thick of the story, an abduction, a villainous Count, and other not unfamiliar personages and circumstances. The story moves briskly, and is fairly well told.—Dr. Cameron. By Lucy Pancoast Smith. (Same publishers.)—This is a commonplace but harmless tale, made up in the usual way of misunderstandings, jealousies, and so forth, winding up with an incident which might be considered by the casuists, of a man in hopeless ill-health taking an overdose of an anodyne by mistake, but deliberately letting it work in order to clear the path of two people who love each other.—Sentenced. By Somerville Gibney. (Chatto and Windus.)—A story of the " detective " kind. It opens with the situation of a man lying under sentence of death for a murder which he has not committed, and the question with which the reader is to be interested is, not so much whether he will be hanged or not, for that one knows to be out of the question, but how his innocence is to be made clear. Such stories have the disadvantage that one knows the end, but a little ingenuity and freshness of treatment make them readable.—We have also received A Strange Wooing, by Charles Gibbon (Ward and Downey) ; and new editions of The Soul of Countess Adrian, by Mrs. Camp- bell Praed, and Thyrza, by George Gissing (Smith and Elder).
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