Hugh Herbert's Inheritance. By Caroline Austen. (Blackie and Son.)—Miss Austen's
new tale is not of a very original kind. The hard-hearted half-brothers who fraudulently deprive their sister of her property, and thus throw her and her family into unexpected poverty, are well known to us. Still, the story, if an old one, has been told with a certain amount of skill, and the interest is fairly well sustained throughout. At times the agony is piled up, we think, a little too high. A dismal succession of ill-fortune dogs the unlucky family, till at last it seems as if nothing could ever save them or set them right again. In the end, however, things do improve ; and if the reader's feelings have not been harrowed past all recovery, he will rejoice at the discomfiture of the wicked half-brothers and the happiness of the long-suffering family. Perhaps the long series of disasters is almost atoned for by the marvellous escape of Hugh Herbert. Only the necessities of fiction could have rescued him from a position so dangerous.
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