`'Mar's White Witch. By G. Douglas. 3 vols. (Samuel Tinsley.)—
'We felt inclined to wish, en getting to the end of this novel, that it had been cut short at the conclusion of the first volume. For that volume is eery-good. The laird, his Highland home—are Highland proprietors called lairds f—and his daughter, so charmingly simple and naive, are very good to read about, while the people to whom we are introduced in Volumes II. and ILL are, for the most part, unpleasing. But doubtless the author felt, and not without justice, that this first volume could hardly stand alone; doubtless the critics would have said, "This -is, all= very pretty, but it leads to nothing and means nothing." So having eeen the hero and heroine married at the end of the first volume, we have to follow them through two volumes more, not without suffer- ing some annoyance. The hero in particular sinks to zero in our -estimation, and if we leave him at last with a tolerable prospect of happiness, we can only feel that it is infinitely more than he deserves. He is nothing short of a scoundrel, when he tells his wife that they were not really married, because, being a Roman Catholic, the ceremony -had- not been performed by a priest of his own faith as well as by a Presbyterian minister, and then goes and offers himself to another woman. He must have known that he was lying, for who is not aware that in Scotland the difficulty is not to get married ? We have some compensation in being introduced to Mr. Octave von Donop, who is really &good sketch, and looks• as if he had been drawn pretty closely alter- life ; but on the whole, the latter part of the story is far less pleasant reading than the first.
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