Is it for Ever? a Novel. By Kate Mainwaring. (London
: Samuel Tinsley.)—If the author of this novel had reduced the inci- dents by one-half, and left out nine out of ten of her descriptions of dress ; if she had also made her signalements of personal appearance consistent with themselves, so as to convey possible combinations, and the notion, so indispensable to the reader's comfort, that the writer has a fixed image in his mind, the book might have been a readable one. But it is a whirl of inextricAle complications, of innocent bigamy, supposed drowning, runnings-away and turnings-up again, out of which one emerges thankful, but exhausted. It is a trifle amid a heap of in- congruities,—very much as if all the materials avaiLable for the use of novelists had been mixed up together in a bag, and this one had pulled out her handful at random ;--but if she should contemplate the pulling- out of another handful, it is as well to suggest to the author that there is some inconsistency in making an angelic heroine go off clandestinely
with a disreputatle lover, leaving her disinterestedly devoted aunt to the misery of believing that she has committed suicide. That the false moral effect of portraiture of that kind should be acknowledged by the artist is perhaps too much to expect, but she ought to be able to perceive its absurdity.
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