CURRENT LITERATURE.
Just Impediment. By Richard Pryco. 2 vols. (Ward and Downey.)—Any one who wants to have his feelings harrowed should road Just Impediment. A very admirable hero falls in love with a very nice girl. She is cultured, modest, beautiful. Every- thing seems to go right, though there is a certain undertone of difficulty which the experienced novel-reader knows will become very serious in the end. And very serious it is, for the lovely girl turns out to be a hereditary lunatic. And this is the sort of thing that is written for pleasure ! We cannot say that the object is attained by the by-plot, which deals with the fortunes of the vulgar profligate Hartley, and the adventuress, his mistress.— Another tale of the same kind is Paul Creighton, by Gertrude Carr Davison (Digby and Long). Paul Creighton kills a rival for the love of Dorothy Mowbray ; marries her, though she does not love him (after five years of married life, she kisses him for the first time) ; and is hanged, with the consolation that she loves him at last, love coining, it would seem, after, if not on account of, the knowledge that he had murdered her lover. "And love—such love as she had never felt for Robert Astley, much as she had loved him—rose up in her breast for the man who was her husband, felon though he was—her husband and her children's father. She loved him now with an exceeding groat love." This also is cheerful—and so natural !
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