Sir Aubyn's Household. "A Plain Unvarnished Tale." By Sigma. (Samuel
Tinsley.)—This is the love-story of two sisters, one of whom is a beauty, the other, at least by comparison, plain. The writer has had the courage to contravene the common tradition in such a ease ; he makes the beauty the finer and the more interesting character of the two. How she gives her heart away, and what comes of it; through what rapids and rough places the current of her love has to run, and how it finds itself at last in peace, is very attractively told in this book. The characters are natural, if not striking; they talk like possible creatures, they never cease to interest us. Tho story is, indeed, scarcely the " plain unvarnished tale " which the author is pleased to call it. The lover is foand to be something like a prince in disguise; the heroine passes through adventures which are doubtless possible, which may even be probable, but which are cer- tainly romantic, and scarcely enter into the calculable contingencies of life in the nineteenth century. We do not know that the book is the worse for the introduction of this more novel and exciting element.
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