Work - a - Day Briers. 3 vols. By the Author of The Two
Anastasias. (Bentley.)—This is a novel of considerable merit, but put together with very little art. The first volume opens with a very pretty little scene, in which we have a father announcing to his daughter, then some sixteen years old, his intention of marrying again. The girl's first impulse of anger, and afterwards her penitent self-reproach, are well described. But the young lady, who decidedly interests us, vanishes from the scene, is never introduced again except as the merest supernumerary, and finally, the writer seeming to think that something must bo done for her, winds up the third volume, some thirty years after her first appearance, with a rather absurd marriage. Then, again, Harry Langhorn's hatred of his brother, painful and unnatural as it is (unnatural, that is, in a man, though possibly not in a woman), is altogether purposeless ; -the cloud lowers over the story for the space of a whole volume, and then disperses without breaking. The same objection may be made to the way in which Hugh Alderson's love affairs aro managed. But the character of the hero, George Langhorn, is well .conceived and well drawn. He is somewhat harsh and unlovely, yet really noble, altogether a more genuine man than a woman's pen, if we are right in thinking the present writer a woman, is often able to de- scribe. There is a good deal of sadness in the story, more, perhaps, than we ourselves like ; but it is of a wholesome kind, and the moral which it enforces is a good one, and not such as novelists often preach.
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