TALES.—Dolly Loraine. By Susan Morley. 2 vols. (F. V. White
and Co.)—The young lady from whom this story gets its name is an attractive creature who, seeming at first to be little more than a flirt, turns out to be a woman of sterling worth, or even, we might say, to be something heroic. For does she not propose to surrender a vast fortune to some unjustly disinherited heir? Of course, this is not allowed to happen ; for the heir is her own lover. But an equally important person is one Cecilia, a lady who contributes to a society journal, and utilises a conversation which she overhears through a hole in the floor connecting her room with her uncle's banking parlour. The story is fairly readable, but it strikes us as being somewhat remote from real life.—She Came Between, by Mrs. Alexander Fraser (F. V. Whits and Co.), is a very tragical story, with a vast expenditure of dashes, notes of admiration, italics, and all the devices by which typography and style express sudden and harrowing emotions. We have love, jealousy, murder, and, just when all things seem to be coming right, a fatal fever. Here is a specimen of Mrs. Fraser's style Outside—light, colouring, melody [what "melody"? it was the week before New Year's Day]. Inside—darkness, the pallor of fleeting life, a wandering brain, and but one refrain on the poor, white, quivering lips, ' Mildred ! Mildred !' " It must be understood that Mildred was the " she " "who came between."—The Island ; or, the Adventures of a Person of Quality, by Richard Whiteing (Longmans), is a love-story the scene of which is laid in Pitcairn's Island, and is a curious mixture of fact and fiction which fails to commend itself to our taste.— The Hanleys ; or, Wheels within Wheels, by Mrs. Comment (Elliot Stock), contains various love-stories, worked up together with some ingenuity and told with a certain vivacity. Serious reflec- tions are not wanting, and the whole, though it wants compression and vigour, has decided merit.—In Glenoran, by M. B. Fife (Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, Edinburgh), contains some picturesque sketches of Scottish life. The story is a little worn. The stern old laird who disinherits an only son through the machinations of a rascally nephew is a familiar figure in fiction, as is the loyal young woman who believes in the innocence of the exile, and refuses to listen to the suit of the interloper. But the merit of the tale lies in the manner of telling, and in the lifelike sketches with which it is illustrated.—Castle Heather, by Lady William Lennox (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.), is a love-story in which there are two heroines, laborantes in uno, the anus being not more blameless than the wandering Ulysses. Captain Wilder, who makes love to a young lady while he has a wife alive, gets, we think, far more than he deserves, and Joan deserved a better husband. Still, the author contrives to make the reader feel indulgently to this very doubtful character. This says something for her skill, and perhaps poetical justice is an obsolete notion.
Stephen Blakemore's Problem. By Edith Cornforth. (Wesleyan Methodist Sunday-School Union.)—The plot, a simple one, has a mysterious will, to be opened at a certain date, a love-story with a gentle and loveable girl for heroine, and the curious incident of a fire which must be kept alight night and day till the heir returns. The stealing of the will is as much an "enigma" to us as it was to some of the characters, and it is not properly worked out ; indeed, the story would have suffered little from the omission of this feeble incident. The heroine is the only individual possessing anything more than the faintest and most sketchy outline of a character.— Una's Revenge. By Melville Gray. (W. H. Allen and Co.)—The writer of this tale must be labouring under some strange delusion to speak of it as a "picture of real life in the nineteenth century." Anything more unreal, or impossible in any century, we have never read.—Caught by the Tide. By Alison L. Garland. (Swan Sonnen- schein and Co.)—A young clerk, who begins his adventures by a narrow escape from drowning, follows this up by becoming heir to a property, which, however, he finds cannot belong to him. He then goes to Italy to hunt up the supposed heir, but shirks the explana- tion to a drunken Italian singer. A second visit is more successful, and having screwed his courage to the sticking place and eased his conscience, he sees his supplanter die from poison. He is then captured by brigands, who keep him secure (at the instigation of the murderer, who has claimed the estate), until he manages to escape to England. The story is somewhat extravagant, but it is fairly well told, and the plot is worked sufficiently well to keep up the interest till the moment when the hero secures his rights for good. Surely it is a somewhat extravagant idea to make a young aristocrat offer to the penniless clerk and his brothers a hundred pounds to change their name, because they have been connected with trade.
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