23 OCTOBER 1869, Page 23

Love Me for My Love. By the Author of Flirts

and Flirts. 2 vols. (Bentley.)—There is more than an average amount of merit in this novel, though it is scarcely agreeable to read, and though the story scarcely excites the faintest interest. The style, too, is careless and without point. But the characters have certainly a distinctness about them which shows some power in the writer. One does not see much, it is true, to like or admire in them ; one does not care what may hap- pen to them; but they make a sufficiently strong impression on the mind as to make it possible to call them up when one closes the book, and this we can say, after a tolerably large experience of novels, is not quite a common experience. The Irish beauty and flirt, Miss O'Grady, with whom the writer has apparently taken most pains, is the least successful. It seems absurd to represent hot as showing an ostentatious regret at her separation from some half-dozen lovers in succession. The best drawn personage is one whose presence in the tale is wholly un- mecepary, the empty-headed, shallow-hearted young dandy, who is yet not wholly foolish or bad, Cosmo Beauclere. We notice as a fact of some interest that the Abergele accident appears for the first time, to our knowledge, in fiction ; and that the author, with a commendable accuracy, uses it to dispose of an Irish peer and his wife.