12 JUNE 1886, Page 23

The Curate's Wife. By J. E. Panton. 2 vols. (Redway.)—Thie

is a sad story of a good woman's heart given to a man who was un- worthy of her, and broken by trouble and neglect. There is some skilful painting of country life in it. Meta, the heroine, is the daughter of a farmer, who has come home from a finishing school, and finds, like a similarly circumstanced young lady in one of Crabbe's poems, that the world is not exactly what she had pictured. We may be permitted to hope, indeed, that the Rectors of parishes seldom have wives of such surpassing silliness as was Mrs. Vickers. Could any lady ever have spoken like this ?—" You must recollect that we are above you in rank, Miss Unwin. If you are with as constantly, as I hope you may be, and you are called by your name, we shall have people taking you for one of our daughters, and that might be extremely awkward F" The curate whom Meta marries, is, we fear, a far more possible character. It is such men, with their mixture of good and evil, that make the misery so graphically described in the second volume of The Curate's Wife,