Judith Gwynne. By Lisle Carr. 3 vols. (Henry S. King
and Co.)— The heroine has two lovers, one of them a man of birth and position, who. has behaved to her with the utmost baseness, a baseness which he avows and justifies with cynical audacity ; the other, an honest fellow, whose love, were she not preoccupied, she would have been glad to return.. We cannot estimate highly the author's capability for judging of the char- acter of women; to us it seems that the humiliating tenacity with which the heroine clings to a love which she knows to be unworthy is not true to nature. Women, we believe, retain their faith in those they love long after all others have ceased to believe in them ; but that faith once destroyed, the idol once proved to be clay, they love no longer.. The worthy lover is driven into "evil courses, children of despair." Among other things, he meets with one Lino. St. Clair, an actress of doubtful character. With her he becomes almost entangled. The scene in which he finally escapes from her fascination is described with some power, but we do not think it edifying. It ends doubtless in the triumph of virtue. So did the "Choice of Hercules." Yet we can imagine this subject treated, say by a French painter, in a way that would make it other than instructive. The fortunes of these four people make up the chief part of the story. The first volume contains a very foolish flirtation of Judith's aristocratic lover with a farmer's wife ; the story is of little use in the narrative, and it would have been far better to have omitted it. Other common-place and conventional characters fill up the scene. On the whole, we may say that the three volumes might have been compressed into one of tolerable capability of being read.
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