26 AUGUST 1871, Page 22

Jfy Heroine. (Tinsloy.)—" I have never seen such an embodiment

of purity and innocence as Geraldine St. Vincent," says the author, Geraldine St. Vincent being "My Heroine." Wo fool quite certain that if she was, she had not studied such literature as the book before us. Briefly, the story is this ; Geraldine marries, by something like compulaion on the part of her parents, a mud man of the world, Colonel Trevelyan, having boforo her marriage fallen in love with a certain artist, Arthur Lostrango. Colonel Trovelyan, renewing an old liaison, is unfaithful to his wife, and the wife discovers the fact. Than wo have depicted to us, with all the force of language which the author knows how to use, the love which the injured wife feels for the man whom she would have married if she had been permitted, and the scenes in which she lots him know that she feels it. "And so," we are piously told, when, to our no small rolief, these scenes are brought to an end, " so God saved these two," We would not dispute the assertion about this divine action, but we will only say that it found a much more willing object in Arthur Lostrango than in the married woman who loved him, and who, in plain terms, made it very difficult for her and him to bo "saved." This is not our notion of an "embodiment of purity and innocence ;" " embodying " these virtues must make a sad difference in them whon the " horoino" can talk as she does to the man from whom hopeless barriers divide her, and who can fall into such a fierce passion when she hours of his marriage with another. Emphatically we say that we do not think this story an edifying ono, oven though it is adorned with a certain religious phraseology, and actually gives us at full length a sermon with which " my heroine " is much impressed.