3 JANUARY 1880, Page 32

"Oh Where and Oh Where ?" a Tale. By Maurice

Lee. (Tinsley Brothers.)—Messrs. Rice and Besant, the popular " Mortiboys," are responsible for the fashion of using lines from songs as the titles of novels. If their followers had their nice appreciation, the general effect would have less silliness about it. Maurice Lee, who is unmistakably a young lady, has been tempted by the examples of "Good-bye, Sweetheart," and "Cherry Ripe" to give an utterly silly title to a tale in which there is certainly a good deal of silliness, but also a good deal of taste and feeling, and some interest. The story opens during the war in Ashanti, and the "young lions" of the British Army do some surprising things, but are not, on the whole, so remarkable as the Ashanti gods. "A few days later, the flames of a wooden city went up to heaven, and the gods of Ashanti howled," is a sentence for which we find it difficult to account. The author writes in an unaffectedly religious strain, and the story is quite read- able, after it gets back from the country of the howling gods to that of the screeching bagpipes.