Oswald Cray. By Mrs. Wood. (A. and C. Black.)—Quite equal
to the average of Mrs. Wood's novels, very readable, very clever, and slightly improbable. The plot requires us to believe that a surgeon in high practice had on the same day to conceal a fatal blunder committed by his assistant and to provide for taking up some bills forged by his son, and that the two acts should be so involved one in another that an in- timate friend full of belief in his character suspects him of a murder for money—a very large draft on the stock of credulity essential to a comfortable reader of novels. This improbability, however, being granted, the story is natural, full of incident, and with the exception of whole pages filled with a sickening apotheosis of Prince Albert, very healthy in tone, Mrs. Wood using the passion of quick gains as her motive-power instead of the passion for committing adulteries. The sketch of the Great Wheal Bang, its rise, its promise, and its fate, is excellent, and so are all the incidents springing out of a surgeon's life, which the anther thoroughly understands and sympathizes with. Why will sho make her heroes such high-minded bores ?
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