Near the Cloisters. By Dr. Henry Stebbing, F.R.S. 2 vols.
(Skeet.) —Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this novel is that there is positively not a villain in it. More than once we seem likely to have one. Buchweiss, the bookseller, learned, polite, and luxurious, might have been a scoundrel of the deepest dye, and, indeed, we are led to sus- pect him of robbery and murder. Killikur, the young physician, might have been just such another ; we know him to be a sceptic, and once he seems to hesitate between suicide and murder. But Dr. Stebbing relents. Tho bookseller turns out to be nothing worse than a luckless speculator ; the physician is changed by the combined influences of evening service in a cathedral and a Dean's pretty daughter, into an admirable Christian. The tale is, indeed, written throughout in a spirit of the most charming optimism. Those who need it are made virtuous ; all are made happy. The orphans find parents, the lovers find wives. The needful amount of adversity is furnished by the unfailing agency of mines, which, with a convenient elasticity, bring down the haughty and exalt the humbled. And to make everything more secure, a pecuniary deus ex machinii descends with a million and a half of money, and the curtain drops on a "solemn, but very splendid close, at St. George's, Hanover Square." Dr. Stebbing writes an easy and pleasant style, says shrewd things and describes well now and then, and will amuse readers who do not ask for too much.
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