The Broken Ring. By Elizabeth Knight Tompkins. (G. P. Putnam's
Sons.)—This is a delightful story, essentially of the- old-fashioned sort, and yet containing some modern inci- dents and characters. It presents us with the old favourites,. the wilful Princess and the disguised Prince; but the Prince takes the unusual form of an officer in the Army of the country which is at war with that of the Princess. And he captures the Princess ; and there are, of course, endless complications, comicalities, and tender passages, until he is declared to be King Karl. It is all very pleasant, and young readers who have got somewhat beyond the nursery stage will almost wish that the lovemaking between the " haughty " Princess Lenore and the not obsequiously deferential Captain Delorme at the old mill did not require to come to an end. General Malakoff, the old Com- mander with but one weakness—a soft side for the pseudo— Captain Delorme —is so good a sketch that one can hardly help fancying he must be drawn from the life.
Messrs. Macmillan and Co. have published a very handsome edition of Washington Irving's The Alhambra, with an Introduc- tion by Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and illustrated by Joseph Pennell. Mr. Pennell's illustrations are good, though here and there they seem to be deficient in distinctness. Mrs. Pennell's introduction is a careful, lucid, and in parts even brilliant piece of criticism. She is alive to Irving's faults. She admits that The• Alhambra has its " moments of dullness" and "abounds in repeti- tions," and that it "has none of the splendid melodrama of Borrow's ' Bible in Spain,' none of the picturesqueness of Gautier's record." But she does full justice to the simplicity and sincerity of Irving's life, his humour, and his powers of observation.
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