23 MAY 1896, Page 22

Florentine characters are much more real to us than Laurence

Trent and the other foreigners. Sylvia Bardossi is the heroine, and a very charming, noble, and simple creature she is. She is very natural, but not more so than Cesare Baldi, the hunchback, with his hopeless passion for Sylvia, and his fiery, though unselfish temperament. Luigi Bardossi, whom an accident to the plaster group of his first work has turned into a melancholy, superstitious, irritable, but ever-loving father, fearful of his daughter's un- happiness and some fate which he believes to threaten her, is a stately, pathetic figure that excites our kindly interest. A flaw on the temple in two successive portrait - medallions of his daughter is to him a terrible omen. Bardossi's Daughter has the germs of a most tragical romance, but the authoress has contented herself with a merely tender story, only disturbed at the end by Bardossi's death.