One Easter Even. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.)—When a gentle-
man with " a low, sensual mouth, and square, resolute chin," who has also "a restless manner, with a habit of casting his eyes about with quick, searching glances," is introduced to us in the third page of the first volume, we know from a doleful experience that there is much mischief brewing, swindling, kidnapping, and villainous plotting gene- rally. Mischief in a novel is now apt to take the form of a " claimant," and a claimant is accordingly one of the characters of the novel before us. These claimants are of course always impostors. In this case he is a particularly gross and manifest impostor, for in fact he is no other than our friend of page 3, only he contrives to get rid of the personal peculiarities there mentioned. Happier than his prototype, he con- trives to get possession of the estates, and though he is ousted from them in the end, a good many years' enjoyment might be considered by unprincipled persons, with "plenty of brains and no money," worth try- ing for. Hence the story cannot be considered instructive. Dr. Kenealy might regard it, from another point of view, as prejudicing the case of his unfortunate client, because it increases the tendency to disbelieve in claimants. Could he not move from the place to which the enlightened borough of Stoke-on-Trent has sent him that novelists be forbidden to introduce this particular incident into their fiction, under penalty of an action for libel? We should be inclined to support him. Side by aide with the main plot there is a most pathetic story of a kidnapped child. She disappears one Easter Even, and another Easter Even " "they stood together silently, they two, man and wife, beneath the pure light of the great moon. Her face was upturned, calm, chastened, holy; his bent down, with a quiet, tender love in it" That is very nice, and all the nicer, from the high-moral point of view, because the lady is the claimant's niece.
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