24 SEPTEMBER 1898, Page 24

Jocelyn. By John Sinjohn. (Duckworth and Co.)—Nove]ists and others ought

to read the satirists and parodists before they put pen to paper. Would Mr. Sinjohn have written,— " A vhort sobbing breath of wind sighed through the olives, Their bps met,"

if he had remembered, "And all Madeira trembled to a kiss" ? 'This is the end of Part I.; with the end of Part II. comes another kiss and the wind again, "The wind carried the whisper away into the remoteness of the desert." The he and she of both scenes are Giles and Jocelyn ; but in the first Giles has a wife, -whom before the second he has killed. That being arranged, they are happy ever after. And this is the kind of stuff for which there is an apparently insatiable demand. Every week a new publishing house is established to supply it.