Only Sea and Sky. By Elizabeth Hindley. 2 vols. (Samuel
Tinsley.)—If this novel had been brought to an end at the close of the first volume—and this might have been done 'without much loss—we should have had little fault to find with it. It is true that a Roman, wish- ing to reverse the saying "Cadent arms togas," would hardly have said, as Miss Hindley thinks that he would, "Cadent toga armm"; but the English of the book is not blamable, and the characters excite a mild, but pleasurable interest. But the second volume distinctly spoils the book. The heroine is frightened into marrying a man, when she only needed toappeal.to the police. That she should have promised is easy
to understand, but that she should have kept to a promise extorted by force is absurd. However, the wretched man pays the penalty of his crime by dying of cancer in the mouth. But the worst thing in the second volume is the vengeance that falls upon the ambitions and unprincipled aunt who, by the familiar device of intercepting letters, has broken off an attachment between her son and the orphan heroine. A mysterious Mr. Smith appears, and it seems that he is her first husband, whom she married for his money, and afterwards pushed over a cliff. He has absented himself for twenty years, and now comes forward to denounce her, on account of her heartlessness to the heroine. Of course, her second hus- band appears in the middle of the scene ; and as in the next chapWr she perishes in a burning house, it must be allowed that vengeance, thengh with foot even culpably halting, did its work very effectually. lb is not impossible that a lady should pneh her husband over a cliff, and that he should leave everything that belonged to him for twenty years, in annoyance at her conduct, but the incidents are scarcely available for purposes of a fiction that would hold up the mirror to life.
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