Guardian and Lover. By Mrs. Alexander Fraser. 3 vols. (Hurst
and Blackett.)—Mrs. Fraser seems to become conscious, when she has got half-way through her allotted space, that she is telling a somewhat familiar story. The young ward and middle-aged guardian (we mean what the young and not what the old mean by "middle-aged ") are well-known characters. And the unwilling promise to marry a distasteful suitor given to a dying father is a sufficiently common incident. Bigamy and murder are, perhaps, in novels at least, scarcely loss frequent, but they are more startling, and Mrs. Fraser relieves, or at least diversifies her story with them. We could have spared the introduction of these incidents. The story might have been developed without them. And the real subject of "guardian and lover," old as it is, is not nnsusceptible of interesting treatment. It is not impolitic to write for middle-aged readers, who form a larger public than the young, these being more concerned in acting novels than in reading them. Mrs. Fraser tells her story with some skill. Contracted into one volume, it would have pleased us more.
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