Lady Marion and the Plutocrat. By Lady Helen Forbes. (John
Long. 6s.)—Lady Helen Forbes has yielded to the temptation which so often besets modern novelists,—to endow their heroes with fortunes so colossal as to make them remarkable even in this age of millions. Francis Frankland, the plutocrat, does not, however, attain to this extremely wealthy state without a struggle, owing to the extraordinary provisions of his father's will. The book is pleasantly written, and the pictures of the decadent Schiehallion family are vigorously sketched, though it may be doubted whether any family was ever quite so intolerable while at the same time capable of producing such a heroine as Lady Marion. The least successful part of the story is the end, which, after the marriage of Frankland and Lady Marion, is rather an anticlimax. The book, while in no sense remark- able, will prove interesting to people who like novels dealing with the aristocracy and with the extremely rich. Both these sections of " smart " society are well represented among the characters, and the only person who seems a little impossible and unlifelike is the hero Francis Frankland himself.
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