1 APRIL 1893, Page 26

The Fate of Fred Lavers. By A. Morrison. (Digby, Long,

and Co.)—The Fate of Fred Lavers is the disjointed autobiography of a man who seems to have lived, and rushed about the world, very much at random ; to have had a " double' curiously like him ; and to have fallen in with a mesmerist and sundry fortune- tellers, whose powers in their respective ways may fairly be termed supernatural. None of the personages in the book are calculated to excite either sympathy or liking ; and when the autobiographer takes leave of his readers by saying that he leads a vagabond life, "keeping the secret of his life to him- self," ono does not quite know why he did not continue to pre- serve that rule of secrecy, instead of departing from it by com- mitting the secret to print.