My Young Alcides. By Charlotte M. Yonge. 2 vols. (Macmillan).
—Miss Yonge has ingeniously applied to the legend of Hercules the method which Miss Thaokeray has used with our fairy-tales. "The Young Alcides" comes from a stock-farm in Australia to face the diffi- culties of a peculiarly complicated position in English life. He starts with the burden of a fatal folly committed in his boyhood upon him, and like his prototype in Greek story, accident has made him not the master of the small kingdom which he has to manage, but the minister of a leas worthy lord. The tale is worked out with much skill, and holds the attention with an unfailing interest. It is a somewhat irritating affectation—if the word may be used without offence—that the old classical names are imitated, and that we hear of "The Arghouse Inheritani," "The Lion of Neme Heath," Lord Erymanth," and so on.. But this is the merest trifle, in comparison with the sterling merit of the story. The hero is a really grand figure. Miss Yonge knows better than most novelists—male or female—how to make her men really manly. Perhaps the cousin, whom a few months' precedence has given the place which seems the other's right, is too consistently silly, too much of a foil, but the general effect is admirable. And Dermot, with his inexhaustible gaiety, is meant for the true contrast to the serious Harold. The story is of its nature too sad to take rank with the author's most attractive works, but it is quite worthy of her powers.
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