The Lost Bride. By Georgiana Lady Chatterton. (Hurst and Blackett.)—Lady
Chatterton is one of the few writers of novels who pursue that calling as an art. In her case it has not degenerated into a mere business. There is a fine flavour of old-world faith and refine- ment in all she writes, which contrasts favourably, to our taste, with the fastness and the flippancy of the present school of fashionable fiction. Her lords and ladies, though rather too numerous, are not merely titled people ; they are aristocrats in the old original sense, they are the best. She is at home with quite the upper classes, through association and sympathy, and with quite the lower, through simple kindliness and comprehension, untouched by condescension. She is one of those writers of whose minds one sees a great deal in their books, and hers is a gentle, high, cultivated mind, with a romantic side to it, and great faith in and reverence for love, according to the la7 of conscience and the grace of God. The Lost Bride is an ingenious and picturesque story of the romantic order, but in which there is a good deal of charac- ter-drawing, and some pleasant and lively sketches of society in England and in Italy occur. Lady Chatterton makes her people talk in the Italian tongue more than occasionally, but she manages this quite naturally and unaffectedly, and though we cannot admit the practice of introducing a foreign language into an English novel to be correct in art, or agreeable as a fact to the general reader, it is certainly not objectionable in this instance.
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