A Blue-Stocking. By Mrs. Edwardes. (Bentley and Son.)—. Mrs. Edwardes
is at her best in this book. It has much of the, racy simplicity of her "Susan Fielding," and of the quiet humour- which we have missed in her later works. The reader knows at once that the story is going to end well ; that the pretty young widow, with the precious, manly, audacious little boy, who meets, Sir John Severna, and hands him the letter he has dropped—it is from his affianced bride, the Blue-Stocking of the story—has put all her sorrows from hot before the reader and Sir John make her acquaintance. Only the delicate distresses and the cobweb5r dilemmas of a love-affair„ in which the gentleman is hampered by a prior engagement to a person so original, so amusing, and so little in love with him as the frank,. dauntless, and generous Blue-Stocking, are to intervene between the pair and perfect bliss. The pedantry and the geological zeal of Miss Clementine Hardca.stle are perhaps exaggerated, but harmlessly so—the legitimate exaggeration of a comedy which tends towards farce. Daphne Chester, the pretty little widow, is a charosing creature, and the' two old maids, her aunts, are admirable ; they may be placed, not, in- deed, on a level with, but somewhere near, Miss Grizzy, Miss Nickyr and Miss Jacky, in Miss Forrior's best novel, Marriage." Mrs. Edwardes gives us such tempting sketches of Jersey, such odd little poops at the people and their ways, that one of the effects of reading- A Blue-Stocking is to give one place, Fief de la Reims, a prominent posi- tion among places to be visited.
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