4 NOVEMBER 1876, Page 24

Within Bohemia ; or, Love in London. By Henry Curwen.

(Sampson Low and Co.)—Mr. Carwen's purpose is to vindicate the romance of London, to prove that "the poetry, the glamour, the mystery, the meaning of life has not been monopolised" by dwellers in the country. As for London,— Quis vituperavit ? One has always supposed that great cities were in an especial way the homes of strong passions and great interests. But Bohemia is not London, only a very small part of it, and the mystery, and glamour, and so forth of Bohemian life are very poor things when we come to look at them closer. But Mr. Curwen does not do justice to his book, which takes a wider range than his title would imply. "The Story of a Plain Woman," for instance, "has no- thing ' Bohemian ' about it; and it is one of the best things, if not the best thing in the volume. Mr. Curwen acknowledges to the influence which Balza° and Edgar Poe have had upon him. We should say that of the two, Balzac has been studied to the more purpose. Poe indeed is a very difficult master to imitate. "The Mystery of Malcolm Mackinnon" recalls most directly his style, and it is most distinctly a failure. It wants the strange verisimilitude which Poe somehow contrived to give to his strangest extravagances, and without which we miss the "blood- creep "which it is the success of such writing to produce.