Darell Blake. By Lady Colin Campbell. (Trischler and Co.)— Lady
Colin Campbell has a considerable amount of literary ability, and she has the advantage of being acquainted with the society of which she writes; but though her one-volume novel is brief, it is tedious, and it is, moreover, decidedly unedifying. Darell Blake is a country journalist who comes up to London to under- take the editorship of an important morning newspaper. He is happily married to a somewhat uninteresting though affectionate and devoted wife ; but he is tempted, partly by vanity, partly by ambition, to fall into the toils spread for him by Lady Alma Vereker, an aristocratic married flirt of the worst type. Lady Alma leads him on so long as she can do so without fear of un- pleasant scandal, and then reveals herself as the heartless coquette that she is by suddenly declining his further acquaint- ance. There is a stormy interview, and, with eyes opened to the baseness of the woman who has ensnared him, he rushes back to the loving wife, who is ignorant of his treason, to discover that she has been prematurely confined, and that she and her baby are both dead. There is nothing positively offensive in the story ; but it is gratuitously unpleasant, and is full of padding, which makes it rather hard reading. We may ask what Lady Colin means by her curious enumeration,—" Wesleyans, Baptists, Non- conformists, Salvationists " ? It is difficult to suppose her ignorant of the fact that Nonconformists include the sects mentioned and many others besides, a Nonconformist being, of course, a person who, whatever his belief, does not conform to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England.
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