A Dead Past. By Mrs. Lovett-Cameron. 3 vols. (F. V.
White and Co.)—The author's characters are all well known to the practised novel-reader. There is the ingenue heroine, with her babyish name of " Kitten ;" the unworldly old savant, her father ; the blasé man of the world, whom, in her innocence, she loves ; the honest boy-lover, whom she thinks little of ; the worldly, unprincipled woman, with whom the man of the world has flirted, and who burns to avenge his desertion; and the old love who has given him up for a richer alliance, and now comes back, freed by her husband's death, to find him just married. The story, which is made up of the sayings and doings of these people, is not worse than its fellows. It is better, so far that the author means well, and inculcates, as well as she can, a good moral,—the man of the world meeting finally with a severe punishment ; but it is wholly concerned with a very hollow and con- ventional life,—that of a number of idle people who have nothing but amusement and intrigue to think of. There is not a touch of whole- some nature from the beginning to the•end.
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