Meg Langhohne. By Mrs. Molesworth. (W. and R. Chambers.) —This
is a pretty story of a love that ends in happy marriage, told, and that very simply and unaffectedly, by the bride that was to be. Mrs. Molesworth has developed of late years a decided liking for the mysterious. She brings in this element skilfully and with good taste, but we cannot help feeling that we should like her stories better without it. Great masters of fiction have tried to introduce it, Walter Scott, for instance, and Mrs. Oliphant, but scarcely made a success. With all the desire in the world to like what so accomplished a story-writer as Mrs. Molesworth chooses to give us, we cannot praise the surprise which she con- trives for us at the end of the book. To abduct a young woman so that her lover may lose a fortune by not marrying her before a certain day does not sound like real life.
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