Music hath Charms. By V. Munro - Ferguson. (Osgood, Mellvaine,
and Co.)—This is unquestionably a clever, but it may be hoped not altogether sincere, study or exercise in the fashion- able fatalism of the day. There is certainly no good reason, at least of the kind that is ordinarily all-powerful in novels, why Victoria Curzon should be thrown from her horse ; at all events, why she should be killed by the fall, just at the moment she is about to realise the genuine seriousness of her life. The death is simply the wantonness of fatalism, and Miss Munro-Ferguson, who has hitherto written simply as " V.," can only be excused for having introduced it into her new story because she has done precisely as her masters and teachers have done before her. At the same time, Miss Munro-Ferguson may be congratulated on having given in Victoria a study of a very complex and capricious and yet not unlovable woman, who just escapes being a second Dodo. Sir Wilton Dawnay, who ought to be Victoria's lover, but is not quite, is also admirably drawn, and the numerous passages-at. arms supply some really delightful scenes. Many of the minor characters, in particular Mrs. Agar, who might very well have been Victoria's good angel, are also carefully sketched. One does not rise, however, from a perusal of Miss Munro-Forguson's pages with added respect for what Sir Edward Clarke once termed "what is called Society." Whether Miss Munro-Ferguson has really any mission as a novelist, it is premature to say. She is a moralist, after a fashion, and it would be idle to deny that for good or evil the moralist has not only claimed but secured a right to be heard in fiction. Miss Munro-Ferguson has something to say beyond all question, and can say it better than the framers of much more ambitious plots than that of Music hath Charms. But it has yet to be seen if that something is enough to justify her in appearing in print.
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