Little Kate Kirby. By F. W. Robinson. (Hurst and Blackett.)—
This is the best of Mr. Robinson's novels in the category to which it belongs. which we may call the "Grandmother's Money" category. The other, which has a separate aim—the systematic elucidation of certain phases of poverty, toil, ignorance, prejudice, and neglect in the lives of some of our conches sociales, which are either ignored in works of fiction, or painted in imaginary colours as injurious to their chances of redress as disregard—is on a different level, and claims to be con- sidered from a different stand-point. Little Kate Kirby is a spirited story, in which the reader's sympathies are enlisted for two sisters, strikingly different, but equally interesting, who are afflicted with a singularly worthless father. The author, whose style has gained in smoothness and grace, shows more uncommon ability in his hand- ling of old Kirby's character than in the case of the girls, well as they are drawn, because there he had every tempta- tion to the conventional and common-place. If he had made• out the complacent, good-for-nothing man, who is so indifferent to his children's fate in their absence, and so exacting when they are with him, an injured victim in the matter of his actual dishonesty ; or if he had converted him by the tragic incident of the book, he would have missed a great opportunity for true delineation of character, and for the recording of the results of real experience. Men like old Kirby are their own victims and their own enemies, and they are not converted by sorrow, which they resent so long as they cannot help feeling it, and banish with all the celerity which their physical temperament permits. All the characters in this book are drawn with care and consistency, and the plot, really complicated and troublesome, is constructed with art which has all the effect of simplicity.
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