7 DECEMBER 1867, Page 21

The Fortunes of Fairstone. By It. W. Baddeloy. Three vols.

(Saunders and Otley.)—To speak candidly, this novel is great rubbish, but it has the merit of being fairly skimmable, and can be gone through without difficulty in little more than an hour. It contains, too, some of the elements of a novel, and for such rubbish it is rather amusing. Still, we do not think any man has the right to put throe volumes into our hands without having bestowed some slight amount of trouble on the story, the scones, or the characters. A fiction is not like a bottle. of medicine, which needs only a good shaking to put it in working order.