Eros : Four Tales. (Chapman and Hall.)—Of these stories, "For
Good or Evil," by Mr. Wingfield, is the best. The three others which make up the two volumes are very mild and watery specimens of composition—for instance, " Lord Flews' Champion " is wholly un- worthy of the author of " Citoyenne Jacqueline," by whom it is written—but Mr. Wingfield has gone at his work with his customary thoroughness. This quaint conceit, which he calls "A Page Torn from the Life of the Grand Monarque," is vividly coloured, and care- fully worked out ; the garrulous old lady who is supposed to tell the story, in the capacity of reader to Madame do Maintenon, does so with a charming mixture of flippancy and pathos, shrewdness and gossip, and produces such a picture of the latter days of Louis XIV. as would please Mr. Thackeray himself. Never has the little man in a big wig been better portrayed, or the dreary, rigid, vapid life of the French Court more truly conveyed. Here is a characteristic passage :— " What a tedious time it was that we spent at Court under the auspices of my mistress ! The gentlemen. though, had much the worst of it, for his Majesty brooked no ladies of the severest eti- quette, expected to bo greeted with smiles on waking, to be regaled with budgets of pleasant news while ho sipped his matutinal choco- late, to be amused through the interminable proce-ss of his dressing, to be wakefully attended during long sermons in the chapel. It mattered not how hungry his attendants might be, or how tired. What right had they to be either the one or the other, in the dazzling presence of the Sun-Ring ? Not that I can conceive of anybody being huegry, after watching the weird process of his adornment. I saw him once, through a keyhole, sitting up in bed in the early light of morning, and rim away horror-stricken at the apparition. I be- held a confused mass of tumbled silken draperies of rainbow softness, enriched with gold and silver, a covering of point-lace, a velvet baldagnin and back-piece cross-hatched with precious metals and seed-pearls, and adorned with heraldic emblazonry, snowy linen lace- trimmed ; in the midst of the glittering ensemble, a round, clay-like something, of dull yellow, out of which loomed into distinctness, after a moment of startled scrutiny, a long, thick, wrinkled nose with a puffy tip, flabby cheeks of wax hanging in festoons, rheumy moist eyes set deep in purple disks, a dreadful tortoise throat, a ballot-pate, from which a satin cap had fallen. I stared transfixed for an instant, then scurried off, horrified at the domi-god thus viewed in the privacy of his own chamber."
The story, which is very well contrived, with a clever mingling of fact and fiction, and a skilful adaptation to the author's purposes of the favourite follies of the period, turns on the misfortunes of the Dec du Maine and the disaster of Namur. Tho fourth story, "Pearls— Tears," is also founded on historical facts, and has a royal and un- fortunate hero, the " Pretender " par excellence, concerning whom so much rubbish has been written in verse and prose. The author of " Miss Molly " contributes to the general mass in the present instance a story which was hardly worth writing. Wo hope there never really existed so silly a young lady as Miss Stuart Campbell, who rules her life on the axiom, " Cleave to the Crown, though it bang on a bush."
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