Bence these Tears. 3 vols. (Bentley.)—Julia Bellamy prefers a handsome
scoundrel of a cousin to the very respectable and wealthy suitor who presents himself, backed by parental authority, in the person of Squire Eadaile,—" hence these tears." The tears indeed come pretty soon. Christopher Bellamy is arrested for forgery on his wedding-day, or rather, would have been arrested, had he not preferred to buy his liberty at the cost of giving up his wife and leaving his country. This is not by any means the ending. Of course a villain of the Christopher Bellamy kind turns up again, extorts money from his wife, plots violent attempts to get possession of the evidences of his forgery—the good people on the other side seem strangely supine and helpless—and finishes with a murder. Meanwhile, Squire Eadaile remains single, and his constancy is at last rewarded by the hand of Julia. For the matter of that, there is no reason why it should uot have been rewarded long before, for Christopher, conscientiously playing the role of the regular novel villain, is found to have committed bigamy ; and the true wife has been living all the time close to some of the actors in the drama. There are some under-plots going on. There is a banker who manages to lose a quantity of other people's money ; a lawyer, half-honest, half-dishonest, who practises some deception which we—probably because we have not had the leisure to read the story with all the attention which the author expects—do not quite under- stand ; two cousins mysteriously alike, who do the reader the service of harrowing his feelings with the dreadful doubt lest a favourite hero should have been murdered, and other things of the kind. Altogether Hence these Tears reminds us—and we really mean no little compliment —of Albert Smith's novels. It has not the same broad fun, and is certainly not so amusing ; the author gives us caricature rather than drawing ; but his caricatures are not without force ; the story moves briskly on ; the dialogue is reasonably lively ; altogether, Hence these Tears may be read without difficulty.
Previous page
