19 DECEMBER 1885, Page 23

A Sea Change. By Flora L. Shaw. (Routledge and Sons.)

—Here we have the familiar incident (more familiar, perhaps, inflation than in real life) of the child saved from a wreck, brought up in ignorance of her birth, and afterwards found to belong to people somehow con- nected with the family into which she has been introduced. But it is invested with a certain freshness by Miss Shaw's way of telling it. We get a picture of family life not wholly unlike in its careful detail and natural drawing to what Miss Austen gives us. The " Old Master," again, at the farm, is in a somewhat different style, but pleases ns in another way. Here we seem to have a reminiscence of Dr. George MacDonald.