The World Before Them. 3 cols. By Mrs. Moodie. (Bentley.)—Mrs.
Moodie reminds us that she is the authoress of Roughing it in the Bush. We had agreeable recollections of this book, and were, we must say very plainly, proportionately disappointed in the World Before Them. We found it to be a strange compound of the novel religious and the novel sensational, both ingredients being made more than ordinarily distasteful by the mixture. The plot is of the most wildly improbable sort ; the heroine, for instance, who is a dairymaid when we first make her acquaintance, becomes a countess in her own right. Does Mrs. Moodie know how many earldoms descend in the female lino? Bnt she does not even care to make her story consistent with itself in the most ordinary particulars. A certain Earl, who plays an important part in it, marries a second wife in 1797, as we are told with the greatest particularity, but the child of this marriage is old enough to have a lover who, being thwarted by his father, enlists and distinguishes himself at the battle of Comma. It does not surprise us after this that the characters talk to each other in the strangest way, and make the most surprising confidences. And yet there are one or two scones which show that Mrs. Moodie is capable of something better. The pictures of farmhouse life in the first volume are bright and fresh, the talk of the farm labourers is well done, and the dialect, as far as we can judge, of a very genuine kind. But this is literally all that we can find to praise. The religions part of the tale we do not care to criticize. The writer's views on this subject are probably very different from ours. But does she think that she ought to put into the month of a fictitious personage an " experience " which is a close adap- tation of the famous story of Colonel Gardiner's conversion ?
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