Milady Monte Christo. By John Pennington Marsden. (Osgood, McIlvaine, and
Co.)—In spite of its too great length, this is an extraordinary story,—extraordinary alike as regards the incident with which it opens and the Defoe-like, rather than Zolaesque, realism with which it abounds. The incident is the application of a young man to a clergyman in Australia for the performance of the marriage ceremony, for the express purpose of having a wife to whom he might leave, in the event of his death, the plunder he frankly admitted he hoped to acquire in the pursuance of an unlawful enterprise. The clergyman who figures in the story is certainly one of the most extraordinary men of his class that ever figured in fiction or in life. He gives up both his work and his character, and enters upon a career of by no means the most reputable adventures which lead him all over the world, and the goal of which is the finding of Melia, the wife of the man for whom he has done so remarkable a service, and who turns out to be the "richest woman in the world, and the Countess of Monte Christo." The close is rather lame. The hero-adventurer, who, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, has had a love-affair in the shape of a, passion for Cora Vanguard, makes a proposal to Melia in this fashion, "I am content to be second in your heart, if I may be there at all. Will that content you ?"—" Well, then, yea, but This book will be read, however ; not for the love-passages, but for the varied adventures and the remarkable characters of the adven- turers, in particular of the brigand husband of Milady Monte Christo, Wallace, the banker—in spite of his tragic death—and the hero himself.
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