Lauristons. By John Oxenham. (Methuen and Co. 6s.)—It must be
a very difficult reader who is not pleased with Lauristons. Does he or she desire a problem ? Well, here is one with nothing unwholesome about it, all the more interesting, perhaps, because, though we know all the conditions, the answer is, and must remain, hard to find. A bank is tottering to its fall, and that fall would bring ruin to thousands : is it right to conceal its weakness and to struggle to set it straight ? Perhaps this is one of the exceptions to the poet's ban on any one who "ex events facts notanda putat." Anyhow, the story in Mr. Oxenham's hands is made exceedingly interesting. It is skilfully combined with the great political issues of the Napoleonic era. There is a charming underplot of the love of John Sax and Marie Lauriston, and not a few brilliantly described adventures,—the escape of Marie, who is one of the English detained in France by Napoleon after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, and the dramatic meeting of Charles Lauriston and Etienne Montessonne at Waterloo. They had been schoolfellows at Westminster, for Montessonne's grand- father was an emigre noble, and now one was fighting under Wellington and the other under Napoleon.
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