In a Grass Country. By Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron. 3
vols. (F. V. White and Co.)—The offence of this book is aggravated by the frivolity of its title, and even of its appearance. If Mrs. Cameron must tell a tale of what she is pleased to call love, let her do it with- out mixing with it these weak descriptions of so called sport, descrip- tions which, to every one who has read Whyte Melville and Trollope, seem intolerably flat. But it is the morality of the book with which we are most concerned. Mrs. Cameron makes a hero of a selfish profligate, who seduces the daughter of his host, and throws over a girl to whom he has engaged himself. This is bad enough ; but it is worse that she makes her heroine—a model, we are led to believe, of womanly purity—condone the offence with a shameful facility. This may be true to life, though we hope that there are some women who would have seen in Riohard Gaskill's conduct a perpetual bar to their union, as perpetual as would have been the like sin in herself. It may be a remote ideal, this equality of offence and punishment in men and women ; but it is an ideal, and a thing to be striven for. But perhaps we are taking too seriously a trivial book only meant to fill up an idle hour for silly people, whom neither good books can profit nor bad books harm.
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