GENESTA. By Accituna Griffin. (John Murray. 7s. lid.) —One cannot
help wondering, sometimes, how it is that books like this ever come to be written. Not that this particular story is really any worse, or even perhaps as bad, as many which somehow manage to find a place on publishers' lists. But it seems astonishing that there should be authors who, having the obvious gifts of Miss Griffin, should be prepared to expend them in writing a book of this kind. The subject of it, we are told, is the unfortunate change which may take place in the relations between two people through a sudden access of fortune and position : an interesting text. But in the end we have all the old characters, doing all the old things in the old, old way. Everard, the charming, unconventional bachelor, heir to a considerable fortune and an old county property, which he allows to go to rack and ruin because he cares nothing for " county" ways and prefers to spend his money travelling to out-of-the-way parts of the world ; -Genesta, his equally charming, but impecunious relative to whom he can leave such of the fortune as is not' entailed, at his inevitably early and unexpected death; • and Richard, her stodgy, pompous little husband who becomes bead of the family and cannot forget it. It is all so jejune and hackneyed that if it were not for Miss Griffin's ability to make these stock figures somehow faintly human, the book would be unreadable.
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