14 MAY 1892, Page 25

Saints and Sinners. By Henry Arthur Jones. (Macmillan.)— Mr. Jones

is a writer of successful comedies, and it is interesting to see, apart from the glamour of the stage, the kind of thing that attracts the playgoer. Saints and Sinners did not owe its success—we must own to knowing nothing more of its stage history than that it ran, as we learn from the book itself, at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, for about half-a-year--to any brilliancy of dialogue. We might describe it as a novel put into conversation, with a good deal that might easily be tedious in the delivery expressed by stage directions. "Lefty stands covered with shame," for instance, expresses in five words what might take a page to describe in narrative. —Princess Maleine, and The Intruder. By Maurice Maeterlinck. (W. Heinemann.)—Here the public may see a specimen of the work of the "Belgian Shake- speare," to use the strange phrase which a French critic invented. Mr. Hall Caine furnishes an introduction, which is certainly worth reading; but as to the dramas themselves, we can see nothing to admire.