20 JUNE 1868, Page 24

A Lost Name. By J. S. Le Fenn. (Bentley.)—In this

novel Mr. Le Faun deals, as is his wont, with the horrible. He has shown himself more than once no mean artist in this kind of subject, a truly sensa- tional writer, not one who uses the vulgar artifice of heaping together startling incidents, but who is able to produce a genuine sensation of fear in his readers, the same sort of feeling which one has in an atmo- sphere heavy with storm. No man ever had a more subtle power of doing this than Nathaniel Hawthorne ; it was done, as we remember, effectively, though by coarser means, in Mr. Le Fann's Uncle Silas. We cannot say so much for even a single scene in this story. All the ingredients of horror, murder, madness, intrigue, are present, and even the suggestion of the supernatural, the beautiful fiend who pays her deadly visits at stated intervals to ilia house of Raby, and whom we seem to recognize in Agnes Mervyn. Nor does the author spare to put on the very thickest and blackest colours, but he does it carelessly and without art. The good characters are, as usual, somewhat shadowy and unreal ; Mr. Le Faun neither feels much interest in them himself, nor expects his readers to do so. Of the bad, Sir Roke Wycherley is, per- haps, the most skilfully drawn ; but he reminds us strongly of the wicked baronet who meets with a violent end in Guy Deverell, and we cannot say that Mr. Le Fann's copy of his own original is an improve- ment. Of the plot, it must in fairness be said that the de'nouement is a surprise; but it is a surprise effected by what looks like a change in the author's purpose ; it explains nothing, and in fact is not nearly so probable or consistent with the story as the end which every reader must have expected. We are inclined to think that Mr. Le Faun invented it to show the most practised novel readers that they may sometimes be mistaken.