Dinah Fleet. By John Hill and G. F. Bacon. (Downey
and Co.)—Dick Rippon, who does not care to follow the paternal occu- pation of corn-dealing, goes up to London to take a place in a pepper and tea business. Pepper and tea do not please him much better than corn, but then he is in London, and London offers him the literary opportunities on which his heart is fixed. And it offers him something more. At a boarding-house he meets the heroine, who is in attendance on a very dragonlike aunt, and who, when the aunt is suddenly carried off by paralysis, finds a situa- tion in the establishment of a fashionable modiste. Dinah has two lovers, an honest one, the Dick aforesaid, and a scoundrel, Miles by name, who is the owner of a financial journal of the blackmailing sort. Messrs. Hill and Bacon now give us a pretty close view of the seamy side of things. We have but little fault to find with their treatment of the subject, if, indeed, the subject was worth treating. Dinah is a very natural heroine indeed, and if only the right set of people could be induced to read her story it might easily be profitable. Of course it is pure Philistinism to talk of profit of this kind. Let an old-fashioned reviewer be excused. He would also ask pardon for remarking that if the clergyman " monotoned" for the First Lesson at the Sunday service which Dinah and her friends attended Judges x, (where Jair and his thirty sons are mentioned), he had had the wrong place found for him. The chapter is never read on Sundays.
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