Spoiled by a Woman. By A. C. Sampson. 8 vole.
(Tinsley Brothers.) —The readers of this novel will find themselves the unwilling victims of an unique experiment. It is a common trick of novelists to engage our interest in two or more distinct threads of narrative, in order to -combine them, after the usual entanglements in the third volume. Our praise or blame is given according to the degree of success attending the mystery and its unravelling. But it is a new thing to give us two -wholly separate groups of characters to set our curiosity agog as to the probabilities of their ultimate relationships, and to find that no sort of .connection exists, after all, oven in their creator's brain. Here the Vaughans, Bennetts, Rays, and Dixons "have their day," and every improbable and grotesque business they make of it ; and the Savilles, ‘Ottwells, and Owenses have theirs, more unpleasant and hardly less far- fetched than the others; but after the first chapter, where a name from each group occurs during school girlhood, there is not the slightest point
• of contact between their life-stories. We prefer to rest content, how- ever, with so phenomenal a conclusion, rather than complain that with a view to the unities, our anther has not added a fourth to the three tedious and ill-constructed volumes before us.
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