NOVELS.—The Lady of Oakinere ; or, Lost Lives. By Charles
Durant. 3 vole:' (Chapman and Ilall.)—This is a clover book, written in a style that is always vigorous, and sometimes oven becomes brilliant ; but we cannot call it a good novel. The story is an indifferent oee, working up again incidents which have been used often enough—it would not be too much to say, too often—before. The heroine marries, to please and accommodate her father, a man for whom she has no love, but a kind of liking ; falls in love, after marriage, with another man, and after coming perilously near to a broach of the Seventh Commandment, dies of a broken heart. In a story of this kind, the second love should be accounted for, and this in such a way as to excite some sympathy for the sinner. Mr. Durant fails to satisfy this rule. He makes the husband ridiculous, taking him on foreign travel, in order to show him to the more disadvantage. But he does not invest the lover with any overpowering attractions. He is a selfish, shallow follow, with nothing but easy manners and good. looks to recommend him,—nothing which ought to win the heart of such a woman as the heroine. But the story is not the strength of the novel. This is rather to be found generally in the ability with which it is written, and in the character of the cynical Allison, which is a creation of no inconsiderable merit. Mr. Durant'd classics are appropriately introduced, and correct, (he would feel flattered by the praise, if he knew how seldom it is deserved !) but his Scripture knowledge is capable of improvement. It was not St. Paul who had a vision in the house of Simon the Tanner.—Genista. By Mrs. Randolph. 3 vols. (Hurst and Blackett.)—This is an ordinary story of how a lost heir turns up, shaking, as such revenants aro wont to do, the "pillars of domestic peace ; " and how a love which had once been thought to be very much out of place, is now found to be extremely convenient, when it can reduce the confusion to order. The due amount of nine hundred pages, or thereabouts, is made up by the introduction of other personages besides the hero and the heroine, and of other incidents besides their love. But we did not find them, or, indeed, the main plot, to be very interest. ing. The book, however, has the merit of being quite without offence. —The Unjust Steward, by H. Broom, LL.D., 2 vols. (Chapman and Hall), really presents no characteristics for notice except its extreme improbability. The extraordinary success and extraordinary fatuity which are combined in "The Unjust Steward" pass all belief, and. would seriously interfere with the interest of a much better written hook than this can claim to be.--Money, translated from the French of Jules Tardion by Margaret Watson (W. H. Allen), is a story which has the sort of unreality about it which is suggested by the idea, so much valued by our neighbours across the Channel, of prizes for virtue. Whether Roland, the literary man, who acts the part of a disinterested and beneficent Providence, the heroic young engineer, or the charming and innocent girl who loves him, better deserved to be crowned, it would not ho easy to say. But they ell seem a little unlike human nature—at least, as we aro familiar with it, under the common-place conditions of our life.
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