Martha Planebarke. A Romance. 3 vols. (Tinsley.)—When an author writes
"A Romance" on his title-page, he seems to give himself a licence to violate all probabilities. We take an instance out of the book before us. Martha Planebarke is an adventuress, and she concocts a scheme by which an old confederate of hers possesses himself of a handsome fortune, this being the way in which she does it :—The two find out that a young lady of whose circumstances they happen to know something has a very scrupulous conscience, whereupon Martha forges some letters purporting to be written by the old man from whom the young lady's father had received an inheritance, and declaring that he meant to leave his money to the before-mentioned confederate. The young lady reads the letters, is convinced by them, engages to show them to nobody, and finally persuades her father, who is described, by the way, as a selfish valetudinarian, to make over the property to the scamp. All that certainly has an air of probability ! Not that we very much object to this sort of thing ; one soon feels absolved from any duty of consider- ing whether this or that character is natural, this coincidence possible, &c., and yielding oneself to the stream of the story, finds not the less amusement because it takes one among regions and into company in which one does not recognize anything familiar or even possible. Martha Planebarke is not a difficult book to read, and the criticism of this kind of novel really cannot go much beyond saying or not saying so much.
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