Rust of Gold. By Francis Prevost. (Ward, Lock, Bowden, and
Co.)—The author of this collection of clever but unpleasant stories and dramatic scenes dedicates it to Count Tolstoi; but he is a pupil of M. Paul Bourget, rather than of the great Russian. All of them, but more especially the first, "False Equivalents," and the last, "The Skirts of Chance," would seem to prove that Mr. Prevost is a close student of feminine nature, and has no faith in anything feminine but weakness. There is something decidedly ghastly, too, in the tragedy of such stories as "A Ghost from the Sea" and "Grass upon the House-Tops," although there is a touch of grotesque in the latter, and in the death, by swallowing a needle, of a poet who does not scruple to make love to his neighbour's wife. Mr. Prevost is most successful in one or two " dramatic " scenes in which he competes, so to speak, with Mr. Anthony Hope, and comes off a by no means bad second. It is almost matter of course that he writes cleverly; as a matter of fact, he treats his readers to far too many elaborately epigram- matic passages, such as,—" He worked his Stoicism on the warp of Epicurus, and hoped the texture would outwear his age ; " or, "There is often a reckless little froth, like that on churned water, in a woman's speech, when she is pleasurably excited, which a man rates with the blown foam that sometimes shrouds his own." Mr. Prevost will write better stories than those con- tained in Rust of Gold when he gets hold of better subjects.
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