James Wyvern's Sin. By Mrs. Mackenzie Daniel. 3 vols. (Skeet.)
—We feel irritated by this novel, when we ought not to have felt any- thing beyond weariness. For this we have to blame the title, which, though not attractive, is effective in its way, promises, in fact, something whieh the novel wholly fails to perform. James Wyvern is a very common-place mixture of knave and fool ; we could not imagine what sin he could be equal to that would deserve the dignity of a tale three volumes long. We thought that this might be supreme art in the writer ; that this common-place villain would burst out upon us in some strange unexpected splendour of crime. At the end of the second volume, even when we get some way into the third, he has done nothing beyond some very ordinary acts of folly and selfishness. At the last he steals his wife's diamonds and runs off with another woman. That is bad and brutal enough, but why make a story of it ? What possible fitness has such a wretched piece of wickedness as this for a work of art ? Mrs. Daniel might find the plots for half-a-dozen novels every day when the Divorce Court is sitting, every one of them quite as worthy of being worked out into a novel as this. Even the virtuous characters have a certain air of the Divorce Court about them. The hero, one of the most admirable of men, if ho does not exactly meditate bigamy, feels it hard that he must deny himself the luxury. After all, we cannot say anything better for James Wineries Sin than that it is an ill tale ill told.
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