Luna : a Mere Love Story. By Margaret C. Helmer°.
2 vols. (Smith and Elder.)—We feel perversely inclined to take a greater interest in the personages whom Miss Helmore displays to us for a brief time in her "Introduction," than in those of the next generatior, with whose fortunes the tale is really occupied. Yet these, too, are presented with no little skill and force of painting. Diane the younger, bound by a family engagement to her selfish cousin, but devoted in heart to the peerless knight whom she sees in Lancelot Chauncey, is a very pretty figure indeed. And so, too, is little Mrs. Ross, though indeed she occupies a subordinate place in the picture, and has her love-story finished, if marriage finishes it, before the tale begins. Harriette Field is meant to be and succeeds in being extremely repul- sive. Indeed, her scheme of becoming the wife of Viscount Kildorin, in spite of the slight obstacle of her being the widow of his brother, is a little too audacious. This part of the story is its weak point. The device of the picture by which Lancelot Chauncey puts an end to the proposed scheme is of a more melodramatic character than suits a "mere love story." Skill in the construction of a plot is not the author's forte ; the disappearance of Diane is not a happy contrivance. One thinks of the young ladies whose mysterious absences are adver- tised in the second column of the outer sheet of the Times, and the association is not agreeable. But the characters are well drawn, the male characters especially are much more vigorous in outline than those which Ivo commonly see from female hands.
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