The House of White Shadows. By B. L. Farjeon. 3
vols. (Tinsley • Brothers.)—A more dismal story than this it would not be easy to imagine. The " house " which is the scene of the story belongs to a family in which domestic unhappiness is, as it were, an hereditary curse. The father has married a woman whose heart is given else- where, and who is tricked into accepting him by the familiar devices of intercepting letters, &c. The old lover appears, a deadly quarrel ensues between husband and wife, and the lover is murdered. The one child of this unhappy marriage is unhappy in his turn. The woman whom he loves marries a prosperous advocate, and then deli- berately tempts the man whom she has deserted. Mr. Farjeon mast be congratulated, if congratulations are appropriate, on desciibing in the advocate's wife a thoroughly bad woman. The only thing at all out of keeping is, we should say, her recklessness. But the advocate has a dreadful secret of his own. He defends, partly out of a desire that right should be done, and partly out of an ambitions desire for reputation, a criminal whom the public voice de- clares—and, as it tarns out, rightly declares—to be guilty of murder. His masterly pleading procures an acquittal. Then the man confesses his guilt to his preserver, whom, by the way, he has attempted to rob. The advocate doubts whether he should not deliver him up to justice,—a proceeding which oar law, at least, does not demand; which would, indeed, have been useless, as the man could have pleaded acquittal.' (What it is in Genevan law we do not know.) Bat the advocate thinks that he has neglected a duty, and the punishment which he is called on to endure is the discovery that the girl whom the ruffian had murdered is his own illegitimate daughter. We wonder whether all this horrible plot is of Mr. Farjeon's contriving. If it is, he has certainly contrived to give it a 'very foreign style, as, for instance, when he says of an old man that "his body was like a bent bow, stretched for the flight of the arrow, his soul." The tragedy is slightly relieved by a comic element in " Fritz the Fool ;" but Fritz is scarcely amusing. Altogether, the reader's pain will not be recompensed by an adequate amount of pleasure.
We have received from Messrs. Sampson Low and Co. Mr. H. Witcomb's edition, in two volumes, of Dr. Spiers's French-English Dictionary. This is the twenty-ninth edition, and is entirely remodelled, revised, and largely increased by its editor, Mr. Witcomb. As the original work was authorised by the Council of Public Instruction on September 7th, 1849, and as every subsequent edition has, we presume, corrected deficiencies in the original dictionary, we need hardly add that this is a most valuable book of its kind.
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