A Golden Heart. By Tom Hood. Three vols. (Tinsley.)—This novel
is also irritating, but it is not also good. It is a compound of melodrama, farce, sensational novel, police report, workhouse revelations, and poetic justice. Mr. Tom Hood has read a great many modern authors and all the newspapers, and the effect both on his style and his originality is somewhat disastrous. As he has thus been enabled to dispense with descriptions of the real life of the world, he has found the more scope for painting faultless monsters which the world no'or saw. No doubt there is some justification in fact for all his incidents taken separately. In one ease he gives us his authority, and tells us a sick woman was actually turned out of a house, and allowed to dio in the street, by an inhuman employer. But Mr. Tom Hood makes the inhuman employer in his novel simply fiendish, while the newspaper paragraph which he quotes is more delicate.
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