possible combinations of incidents? It is de rigueur that the
principal interest should lie in a love-story ; and there is still a strong prepossession in favour of this love story concerning two unmarried persons. The necessary obstacles must be introduced, or how shall the tale be produced to its legitimate length ? And here it is that the novelist's difficulty occurs. These obstacles are coming to be worn out by long use. The one, for instance, which Mrs. Eiloart employs, madness in the family, has been used so often that readers are wearied of it ; and it has the special disadvantage of being very difficult to overcome. And so our author, having to satisfy a public which demands that the hero and heroine shall be happily married, is driven to have recourse to a very improbable explanation, which we will not further criticize than by asking whether any of our readers ever knew a person who was discovered just in the nick of time to be somebody quite different from what every one had supposed him to be. Mrs. Eiloart's plot, therefore, we must call weak ; but she does her best to make up for it. Many of the sketches of characters are vigorous and life-like, scenes of social life are well described, and the conversations are managed with skill.
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