Gianetta. By Rosa Mulholland. (Blackie and Son.)—Really, the girl who
tells this "story of herself" makes a large, we might even say a too large, demand upon our faith. It is not only that twice she turns out to be something different from what we suppose—first changing from a ragged girl in a valley of the Italian Alps into an English heiress, and then changing back again, though not exactly into rags, rursus et in veterem fate resoluta figuram—but that she acquires the habitudes of her new life with such astonishing rapidity. Still, if we take this for granted, we can find no little pleasure in reading Gianetta's tale, —at least, in reading the first part of it. In the second we are taken to Ireland, and treated to a harrowing description of the sufferings of the tenants of Glenmalorne when they are evicted by their cruel landlord, Sir Rupert Kirwan. Now, this, we submit, is not the time to write about cruel Irish landlords. Whatever there may have been in time past, there is very little power, whatever will there may be, in an Irish landlord to be cruel. Miss Mulholland writes, it must be understood, of the present time. Of this there can be no doubt ; and yet she writes as if all that has been done to protect the Irish tenant had not been done at all. She talks of screwing up rents to the uttermost possible or impossible farthing, as if there were no such thing under the sun as "judicial rents." It is impossible to acquit her of injustice.
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