13 JANUARY 1906, Page 23

"For Richer, for Poorer.", By Edith Henrietta Fowler (Mrs. W.

Robert Hamilton). (Hurst and Blackett. 6s.)—The personages of this novel do not inhabit the workaday world which is known so well to all of us. They live in some distant fairy7 land, or, perhaps it would be more correct to say, stageland, whore the good people are extremely good and the bad rejoice in unspeakable villainy. The worst person of all is, as usual in this particular stageland, a Baronet. Perhaps we do him an injustice. He may have been merely a Knight, but in character he is quite worthy to rank with all the other " bad Barts " of stageland. There is also an old clergyman, who is as bad as a clergyman can be until his better feelings are aroused by the simple trust and confidence displayed by the heroine, who (although she is a complete stranger to him) suddenly arrives one afternoon accompanied by an invalid mother with the obvious intention of making a long stay in his house. In real life, of course, a man such as the Rev. Joseph Mortimer is described as being would have ordered Sydney and her mother off the premises immediately, but in Miss Fowler's pages he meekly submits to the amazing invasion. If one accepts the unfamiliar point of view from which the book is written, it is not bad reading, but it can certainly not be described as being a true picture of real life.