Uncle Bob's Niece. By Leslie Keith. 3 vols. (Ward and
Downey.) —"Uncle Bob" is a Scotchman who has made a "pile," and comes to London to spend it, and to struggle, by help of that money, into the circles of the Upper Ten. This is just the sort of man to fall ultimately into the hands of a very shrewd villain, and this the author makes him do ; only that her villain does not seem to be very shrewd. Mr. Paul Behrens is not a comprehensible person to us. A clever man might have done better for himself than by such a palpable bit of folly as the " Anglo-Norse Herring Company." This kind of thing does very well for an avowed caricature; but Miss Keith's tale is meant to be serious. Her story has merits. The old man himself, with all his greed of money, has a certain pathos about him. The heroine is uniformly charming. The humours of boarding-house life are given with some skill. On the other hand, there is a lack of shading in some of the characters,—in Jessie Temple, for instance, who is too intolerably disagreeable ; and we are bound to say that John Temple, the good young man, is a sad bore.
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