Doubleday's Children : a Novel. By Dutton Cook. (Sampson Low
and Co.)—Mr. Dutton Cook is rather a lively and entertaining writer, than a successful novelist. He has the faculty of attracting his readers by fits and starts, of fixing their attention on certain chapters, and conveying to them vivid impressions of eoltain persons and episodes, but he has not the power of carrying on through a series of events and a long process of development of character the attention and interest with which one follows the thread of a well-constructed story concerning tho doings, the sufferings, and the destinies of persons of whom one has conceived a distinct notion, and for whom one has learned to care. Doubleday's Children furnishes an wimple of the author's successes and also of his failures. The story is not strikingly interesting; none of the persons concerned in it awaken the sympathies of the reader, unless, in- deed, it be poor Doubleday himsolf, the unsuccessful architect, who never builds anything except castles in the air, introduces "the man in posses- sion "to his puzzlod and disgusted children as "Uncle Isaac," and dies in the Queen's Bench Prison. The "children " are not attractive persons, though they are well contrasted, and Nicholas Doubleday is a well- drawn Philistine, of a period when the term had not yet been invented. It is romarkable that no writers of fiction, not even the Erekmann- Chatrian partners, have succeeded in investing the Revolution of '48 in Paris and the fall of Louis Philippe with interest. The bourgeois complexion is over it all, always. Mr. Dutton Cook is no exception; he cannot break the spell. Paul Riel, who marries Doris Doubleday, conspires against the Bing " with a pear-shaped head," and gets his death-wound at a barricade, loaves the reader quite unmoved. The book abounds in clever skotchos, brilliant and humorous bits of de- scription—that of the Radical editor, the Jow bailiff, the professor of elocution, for instance—and in passages of shrewd observation, so that it is pleasant reading, although it is but an indifferent novel. Sometimes tho author is very amusing, as, for instance, when he makes the littlo Basil inform an inquiring stranger that he (Basil) lives in " Queer Street," having hoard his father's location thus described; and when the children draw their wise inferences from their impecunious parent's demeanour. "When my father," says Basil," was unusually strict about such matters as attendance at family prayers, or the church-going of the servants, we prepared ourselves for the advent of a man in possession (' when ho was peculiarly white and starched about the cravat, we made sure that ha expected hourly to be arrested for debt."
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