This Son of Vulcan. By the Authors of "Ready-Money Mortiboy."
3 vole. (Sampson Low and Co.)—Thero is plenty of matter in this story, of incident and of character. It can hardly bo said that there is a plot, if this means any complication which even pretends to baffle or surprise the reader. But there is a story, and it is sufficiently interest-
ing, if it is scarcely exciting. Then the characters are vigorously drawn. The hero is indeed of the ordinary typo of the model young men who make their fortune, though the author has sought to give him a difference, by making him commit one stupendous act of folly, which seems to us out of all harmony with the rest of his doings. But Paul Bayliss and Miles Cuolahan are both well drawn. So is "Cardiff Jack." The story of his ending is a curious psychological and physiological study, which looks like reality. The worst fault we have to find with the writer is want of taste. Popularity seems to have spoilt him, and ho ventures to write things which are really intolerable. Nothing can justify such offensive passages as this :—" Fancy Adam and Eve waking up the morning after that fatal business of theirs, perhaps a little unwell in consequence of a change of diet," dm., or thus speaking of the javelin that Saul aimed at David, that " it would have saved the life of Urialt, while it deprived the English service of her chaunts." If the writer likes to point a jest out of Scripture, he should, at least, know his subjects, and not talk, for instance, of Naboth's sons having been very troublesome to Ahab's successors. What, again, can ho mean by the extraordinarily foolish saying," Like most thoroughly unpractical men, he had been at Oxford ?"
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