La Fenton. By Gwendolen Douglas Dalton. 2 vols. (Eden, Remington,
and Co.)—As this novel cannot possibly do its readers any harm—for if they find it tiresome, they can shut it up—and as there is a possibility that it may do them good by affording them a good laugh at some of its many absurdities, it would be an act of gratuitous unkindness to subject its laughter -provoking features to serious analysis. When, on a very early page, we read of one of the masculine characters that "sympathy seemed to exude from every pore of his being," we have a presentiment of what is in store for us in respect of mere style, and the matter and manner of the book are in perfect harmony. The combination of gushing sentimentality and wild sensationalism seems to take us back to the fiction of the Minerva Press period, or to the transpontine melodrama of a more recent date; and there is really a faint pleasure akin to the pleasures of memory, in the contemplation of the woes of the much-persecuted heroine and the machinations of the theatrical villains who plot and rave through Miss Dalton's romance.
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