Dream Faces, By Hon. Mrs. Fetherstonhaugh. (Richard Bentley and Son.)—This
is a pretty book, printed in violet ink on glossy paper, with a poetical motto—" While the wheel spins bravely, the flax wears fast "—on the title-page. It has a fly-leaf between each chapter and, its successor, and on those fly-leaves are various samples of poetry, mostly of the passionate, but occasionally of the philosophi- cal kind. It wears an aspect of elegance, and the reader prepares for something "sweetly pretty." It is difficult to say what he finds, for the story has nothing to do with the title, and it is a dis- tracting mixture of flimsiness and confusion. Through hunting and steeplechasing to illicit love, and so on to suicide, the reader plods patiently, or skims contemptuously, according to his temper, but in either case wondering what this scrappy reminder of the Guy Livingstone men and the Ouida women, of whom he has had so much more than enough, is all about. The sentences with which the story ends are a fair and sufficient sample of its taste and its tone :—" When the earliest gleam of morning sun- shine peeps in where the massive velvet curtains have been torn aside, it shines on a strange, sad sight. A woman sits there, whose calm, proud face looks even more beautiful in Death than it had looked in Life, with diamonds glittering on a brow and breast, whose coldness matched their own, and on her pale lips a smile that speaks of peace to the weary spirit that has fled." The author of Dream Faces describes Henry VIII. as a "jovial Lothario." She also speaks of "the pastoral simplicity" of the second act of "La Dame aux Camelias,"—does she consider that vice when it goes oat of town is pastoral and simple ?
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