RECENT NOVELS.* IT cannot, we think, be said that Mrs.

Walford's latest book is also her best, but The _Mischief of Monica is certain to be enjoyed, because the kind and quality of its author's work are always enjoyable. There are chapters in the new novel, as in its fore-

runners, which recall some of the characteristics of the author of Emma and Pride andiPrejudice, for though Mrs. Walford has neither Miss Austen's lightness of touch, nor her never-failing fund of bright humour, she has a good deal of that persistent and interested wakefulness of sympathetic observation which enabled her great predecessor to give a charm to the

apparently charmless commonplaces of ordinary life. Per- haps the resemblance is most obvious in those pages where Mrs. Walford has to deal with a mildly dramatic social situa- tion, such as that presented to us in the chapter in which Lady Dorrien and Harry call upon the Lavenham girls, and find not only Mrs. Schofield and her daughter, whom they are congratulating themselves upon having missed, but the terrible Mrs. Palmer, who will not be ignored, and persists in putting herself in evidence. The confused delight of Mrs. Schofield, the nnconfused boldness of her social rival, the well-concealed consternation of Monica and Bell, and the polite meekness with which Lady Dorrien endeavours to obey her husband's injunction, Down on your knees to these people !" are depicted with much of Miss Austen's quiet finesse of satirical humour and felicity of both broad and subtle de- lineation. The members of the Carnforth family are also capital, particularly Mrs. Carnforth, whose " special gift lay in the countrifying department," and who is so artfully art- less, so urbanely rural :—

" She would not have her firewood cut too small nor trimmed too neatly. At some great house where she had once visited, she had noted the size of the billets—billets no longer—and had had her fireplaces built to order. Thus she would say, ' We burn our own wood,' with as easy a grace as I have been down to the farm."

Thus cleverly does Mrs. Carnforth push the prosaic Liverpool office into the background of life ; and such happy touches abound in the portraits of the subordinate personages. Mrs.

Walford's heroine is less successful. In Monica we are intended to see a proud, self-willed girl, spoiled not by over-indulgence, but by a society training of the most contemptible kind, which has given the weeds in her nature every chance, and the flowers no chance at all. We do not think, however, that among

these weeds vulgarity is meant to be included ; but, in spite of surface refinements, there is something essentially vulgar in the whole scheme of mischief which gives the book its title; and in Monica's conduct at her first meeting with that silly but kindly woman, Mrs. George Schofield, the vulgarity is naked and not ashamed. To represent well bred impertinence

without making the impertinence eclipse the good breeding, requires an unusually light hand.

Mr. W. E. Norris's new story is somewhat slighter, as well as shorter, than his three-volume novels, but Miss Wentworth's Idea has all the ease and finish of workmanship which the writer long ago led ns to expect in every book from his pen. The relations between Miss Wentworth and the head of the Society of St. Francis are delineated with singular skill and subtlety. Muriel is not one of the superficial, flighty, impul- sive girls whose minds are full of a religious vocation to-day, and of a new bonnet to-morrow ; nor is the Hon. and Rev. Ernest Compton one of those clerical fanatics to whom the offered discipleship of a young, enthusiastic, and wealthy woman is a temptation not to be resisted. Miss Wentworth is genuinely in earnest, and by her present knowledge of herself, her earnestness is justified ; but Mr. Compton's experience of men and women enables him to perceive that this knowledge is incomplete, and his insight and foresight are justified by the event. " Urgent private affairs " soon claim the mind and heart of the intending sister of St. Francis ; but Mr. Norris gives a pleasant, unconventional freshness to his book by concentrating the interest, not on Miss Went- worth's own quiet love-story, but on the part she plays as guardian-angel to poor, self-willed Sylvia, who has given her heart to the charming profligate from whom her selfish, easy- going father has failed to protect her. This Mr. Wentworth,

• (1.1 The Mischief of Monica. By L. B. Walford. 3 vols. London : Long- mans, Green, and Co.-12.) Miss Wentworth's Idea. By W. E. Norris. 2 vols London : Ward and Downey.—(3.1 Ruling the Planets. By Mina E. Burton. 3 vols. London R. Bentley and Son.—(4.1 Miss Mazice'l's Affections. By Richard Prvce. 2 vols. London : Chatto and Wincing.— 5.) That Pretty lettle Horse-Breaker. By Mrs. E Kennard. 3 vols. London : F. V. White and Co.- Ia.) Beggars All. if it L. Dongall. London : Longman, Green, and Co.—(7.) liareissa Brendon. By Edward Peacock. 2 vo's. London: J. Hodges.

Muriel's middle-aged half-brother, is a triumph of unobtrusive art ; for he represents one of the most familiar and commor - place of society types, and yet without a single touch of strain or exaggeration, Mr. Norris gives him the full individuality of a new creation. His refusal to believe in the possibility of danger in Sylvia's constant meetings with Sir Harry Brewster, because such belief would entail action to which he is personally disinclined, is thoroughly characteristic of his tribe, and there is both fine satirical humour and subtle knowledge of human nature in the picture of his quick recovery from the wound inflicted on his lazy self-complacency by the occurrence of the event he had declared impossible. Mr.. Norris's books are always pleasant reading. because he writes of a society which he really knows, and proves himself a culti- vated man of the world without any of the shallow cynicism by which the literary man of the world is too often distin- guished.

A novel and decidedly ingenious plot is the most striking feature of Ruling the Planets ; but it has other attractions than the mere excitement and gratification of curiosity, though this special kind of interest is soon aroused and admirably sustained. Just now, when so many romancers are finding a theme in this or that fantastic superstition, it may be well to say that the title of Miss Burton's book has no astrological significance. The persons in the story hold no converse with the stars ; they are simply engaged in an attempt to interfere with the natural course of things in such a way as to prevent a certain event from being followed by an apparently inevitable consequence. The just-deceased Mr. Mowbray Fanshawe has held the estate of Birch- holme under a curious will. At the time of his death he has two nephews, Herbert and Charles, and the will provides that,. should Herbert or his issue not survive him, the estate, instead of passing to another member of the family, shall be sold for the benefit of public charities. Unfortunately for Charles Fanshawe, his mother, and sisters, Herbert dies a few hours before his uncle. On the day after the two deaths, when only the later event has been made public, Dr. Sinclair, an intimate friend of the family, meets Stephen Maurice, who bears a striking likeness to the dead heir, and it is suggested by the doctor that Stephen shall personate Herbert for a few days, and thus avert a wrong which the framer of the will never contemplated, and which he would have deeply regretted. Such is the curious situation disclosed in the opening chapters, and the theme of the novel is the history of Stephen's perilous and somewhat equivocal undertaking. Of course the narrative scheme is one from which improbabilities—indeed, practical impossibilities—cannot be excluded; but they are very skilfully managed, and the successive complications provide materials for a decidedly interesting and well-told story. Miss Burton's style is clear, simple, and correct, and Ruling the Planets, when once taken up, will not be readily laid down.

Mr. Richard Pryce has written two or three very clever books, but he has not previously given us anything that is at once so able and so pleasing as Miss Maxwell's Affections. The story itself is one that with slight variations has been told a hundred times ; and in days when cheerfulness is at a. discount, and the old traditions of fiction are scoffed at and scouted, Mr. Pryce shows his courage by employing the most familiar machinery to bring about the conventional happy ending. This deliberate avoidance of novelty in the matter of theme serves, however, to throw into relief the bright fresh- ness of the treatment which makes the book one of the most enjoyable of recent novels. The portraits of women—of Gertrude Maxwell, the charming heroine, of her worldly aunt, Lady Julia, of the gossiping postmistress, Mrs. Peck, and of the hysterical, malicious girl, Miss Ransom—are painted with such subtle truth that, had Miss Maxwell's Affections been published anonymously, we should have had hardly any hesita- tion in assigning it to feminine authorship. Curiously enough, the two principal masculine characters, France Woodford, whom Gertrude loves, and Wilfrid Graham, to whom she consents to become engaged, strike us as being a shade more conver - tional, and therefore less successful; but Lord St. Pancras, though a mere sketch, is most happily individualised, and the same may be said of another supernumerary, little Johnny Harwood, the rejected suitor and the faithful friend. The book is rich in humour, for the most part of the subtle rather than of the obvious self-advertising order, nor is it lacking in passages of very beautiful and winning tenderness and pathos.

Lady Julia, whose two match-making schemes come to grief in very different ways, is delicious ; but perhaps the most remarkable feature of Miss Maxwell's Affections is found in the fact that it contains some passages of simple description which no single reader will feel any temptation to skip. At any rate, if he skips the description of a morning's rain in the country, followed by the wan sunlight and sweet freshness of an autumn afternoon, which begins on p. 95 of the first volume, he will miss as good a thing of its kind as he has ever read.

As we were compelled to speak in somewhat severe terms of Mrs. Kennard's last novel, A Homburg Beauty, we are pleased to be able to say that, whatever be the defeats of That Pretty Little Horse-Breaker, it is, at any rate, a pleasant and wholesome story. There is all the more reason to say this at the outset, as Mrs. Kennard has chosen a title which will be the reverse of attractive to those readers of the better class who remember the association of the term " pretty horse-breaker " with certain unsavoury society scandals of some twenty years ago. In this case the choice is inappro- priate as well as unfortunate, for the author's heroine is not in the least an improper, or even a fast young woman. She is a frank, affectionate, courageous, true-hearted girl, with many of the qualities which in a youth of the opposite sex we should call manly; but she never becomes in the least masculine, remaining a woman to the core, even after she has taken the unconventional step of engaging herself as rough-rider to Mr. Ruddle the horse-dealer. Even the inventive skill with which Mrs. Kennard involves Kitty in difficulties from which digni- fied escape is difficult, hardly suffices to veil the improba- bility of this expedient for complicating the story ; but one moderately sized improbability per volume is not more than a fair allowance to the ordinary novelist, and the author of this story keeps well within it. Captain Mordaunt, the unworthy lover who jilts Kitty when she is no longer an heiress, is a typical specimen of the natural cad playing for a time a part alien to his inborn aptitudes ; and if Lord Algernon Loading- ton, his rival, is a somewhat conventionally perfect hero, the writer has managed to endow him with a pleasant vitality. Mrs. Kennard's novel, though in no way out of the common, is, in short, very readable.

Beggars All is a sombre but exceptionally strong story by a new writer from whom good things may confidently be expected, and by whom even great things may possibly be achieved. The plan of the book has a refreshing novelty of invention, and what is of more consequence, the invention does not stand alone, but is throughout reinforced by an imaginative realism which gives the impressiveness of vividly conceived fact to incidents and situations which, in the hands of an inferior writer, would almost certainly seem fan- tastic or incredible. Esther Thompson—generally called " Star"—is a gently nurtured girl who, to quote the familiar phrase, has known better days. Finding herself unable to pro- vide an invalid mother and sister with the comforts which are to them necessaries of life, she answers a matrimonial advertise- ment the wording of which has inspired her with a gleam of hope, and before many weeks have passed, becomes the wife of the advertiser,—a young journalist of humble birth, steady habits, and unblemished reputation. At their first meeting, Star has acquainted Herbert Kent with the motive which alone could have prompted her to the step she had taken ; he accepts the charge which she lays upon him; and not for a moment does the young wife repent her act of apparent temerity, until one day comes a bolt from the blue which wrecks poor Star's edifice of happiness, and separates in a moment the past of peace from the present of anguish. The nature of this situa- tion, which is the key-stone of the story, it would be unfair to disclose ; but it has a dramatic force which impresses the imagination as it can only be impressed by the adequate rendering of a conception that is intrinsically rich in strong and simple human interest. To this crisis all the preceding portion of the story has been leading us ; out of it by inevi- table sequence comes everything that follows ; and the whole is a drama with the one essential unity,—the unity of life, growth, and organic development. It is long since we have had a first book so rich in both performance and promise.

Though Narcissa Brendon is compressed into two volumes, it is of average three-volume length, and it seems even longer, —an expression of feeling from which it will be inferred that we have found it somewhat hard reading. Mr. Peacock, who is evidently a thoughtful and cultivated man, writes well; but

even writing as good as his does not in itself suffice for the production of a satisfactory novel. He is sadly deficient in a feeling for form, and in a sense of what is needful in the way of presentation to make his conceptions as real to others as they are to himself. For example, the story opens with a misunderstanding and quarrel between the hero and heroine, and it must be supposed that Mr. Peacock's narrative scheme, as planned in his own mind, includes some explanation of their estrangement ; but to every one else it is perfectly unintelligible, and therefore altogether uninteresting. Shortly after her alienation from her lover, Narcissa, who is represented as a high.minded and noble girl, marries a man with whom she does not even fancy herself in love ; and here, again, Mr. Peacock gives us no clue to the secret of her action. Then there is a small crowd of characters who, having neither intrinsic interest of their own, nor any influence upon the action of the story, represent so many inartistic intrusions ; and everywhere the narrative is made confused and confusing by lack of grouping, orderly develop- ment, and discernible relation of cause and effect. In the second volume, the somewhat slow movement of the narrative is accelerated by the movements of a certain Major Thornton, a melodramatic villain who is strong in murder, abduction, perjury, and miscellaneous scoundrelism ; but even his mis- deeds seem largely motiveless, and the reader never gets a really satisfying grip of the story. Mr. Peacock is clearly an able man in many ways, but in devoting himself to fiction he has taken a wrong turning.