Through Flood and Flame. 3 vols. (Bontley.)—This is a highly
original and vigorous novel, although the promise of the first volume is• not quite sustained through the second and third. Tho typos of character in Flood and Flame, albeit not altogether unfamiliar, are sufficiently fresh and unhackneyed to engage our attention. Neither are they, with one exception, to bo noted presently, exaggerated or over- drawn. Tho "converted Man-Monkey," though painted in bold and glaring colours, may be met with under different appellations any day in most of our manufacturing towns. Joo Earnshaw, the victim of a trade outrage, who becomes crazed under the deadly wrong that has been done him, and the utter destruction of his hopes and prospects which it effects, is another fine portrayal. In fact we may award a greater or less amount of praise to nearly all the personages in the story, first and foremost of whom is the plain and blunt bat high-souled factory girl, Martha Rhodes. But it is passing beyond the limits of a novelist's licence to represent a doctor's wife seeking to increase her husband's practice by carrying infection from the houses of the poor to those of richer patients. And in the name of common sense we must protest against Mrs. Doldrums. One has hoard of eccentric people having their own coffins made and keeping them in their bed-chambers ; but Mrs. Doldrums, being, as she herself says, " in her fatteninga," so rapidly outgrows her coffin that she finds it necessary to have a fresh one made every few months, and very liberally offers the superseded ones to her friends, whenever she hears of a death in their families !
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