Mount Cannel: a Story of Modern English. Life. (Bentley.) — If this
story resembles fact, modern English life must be much more like an. ill-arranged melodrama than we had thought. We have hero a young lady who keeps the evidence of her legitimacy (the church with the marriage registers has, of course, been burnt) among her dresses ; a maid, otherwise an angel, who steals them ; a thief who brings them back when they are wanted ; a villain of the deepest dye ; a profligate nobleman who repents, and sundry other familiar characters of romance. We cannot say that the author makes these people seem anything more- than the merest puppets, or even that the puppets are moved very skilfully. The best thing in the book, we should Bay, is a slight angling sketch, which has a certain freshness and reality. Only we wish that two-pound trout were more common phenomena of modern English. life than they unhappily are.
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