22 APRIL 1865, Page 22

Donnington Hall. By the Rev. F. Talbot O'Donoghue, B.A. (Saun-

ders, Otley, and Co.)—.A curious novel in one volume,—curious because the female characters are all better developed than the male—Lady de Marbury than her son Sir John, and Mrs. Hutton than her husband the rector. The writer must have had great experience at tea-parties. The power of drawing character is not, however, great, and the story is too much devoted to puffing Anglicanism at the expense of Romanism on the one hand and the Evangelical party on the other—clerical squab- bles for which the world cares much less than the author seems to imagine. Besides, the incidents are extravagant. An English clergy- man who has joined the Roman Church passing himself off as an Evangelical, and doing duty at a chapel of ease, in order to facilitate Romanist conversions by the badness of his Protestant argument, and the virulence of his Evangelical bigotry, is really too strong a dose. The hero gets into Parliament as a Young Englander, which Mr. O'Donoghne defines as "High-Church Chartism," a new form of the perfect bliss in which a hero closes his fictitious existence.