Novets. , ----A Woman of Mind. By Mrs. Adolphe Smith. 3-vols. (Sampson
Low and Co.)---Silvia is the daughter of a country squire, one Admiral Clevedou, who is described as administering a some- what Draconian justice,—sending a man to prison, for instance, for getting drunk. The Admiral is a- very rigid-Conservative. Silvia is a Radical, and rebels against the conventional maxims and moralities of the society in which she moves. The Admiral is so dismayed at the revolutionary tendencies which she displays, that he leaves his property away from his daughter to a cousin, who, however, is to marry her, if she is willing. Of coarse she is not willing, for 'the cousin is nothing better than one of the jeuvesee dorde, and has no sympathy with her aims cud beliefs. Silvia, therefore, leaves her home, with nothing but a legacy of £300 that she can call her own. The account of her endeavours to obtain employment is interesting, and has. the pathos which such accounts seldom fail to have. And the description of her work, as secretary. to some sooiety for the benefit of women, is equally' good. This is the strong- point of the book. Those chapters may be read, with real, practical benefit, though it is-not every One who has the heroine's natural gifts of tact and kindly sympathy. Silvia's, influence raises. a young man who has been hitherto content with. social successes, to honest-weak. Hirrendeavours take a turn which would have scandalised many of the-more serious novel-readers of an older generation, for he makes himself a groat name on the stage. We may be allowed to suggest that lie rises to the pinnacle. of fame with unexampled ease. To such criticisms on its construction this novel is often open! but it is a good book, nevertheless, admira,ble. in its' aim, and written with intelligence- and- force.—Afargaret Dunbar. By Annabel Gray. 3 vols. (Tinsley Brothers.)—This is one of the very oddest books that we have ever road. It contains sentences more ungram- matical than anything we. have seen before in print. The following is no unfair specimen :—" Margaret only hungered for an embrace that could never more be hers, haunted by , the feeling of those other lips, she had last kissed before they both fell asleep, feeling which, solemnised every instinct and comprised all her past." And yet there are shrewd' and clever observations scattered here and there throughout the volumes, soil the story, absurd in many respects as it„is, yet somehow contrives. to carry us. on to the end.. Margaret, who is a very curious mixture of precocity and simplicity, saves a man from a wreck, and affords a proof that there is some truth in the old sea-side superstition that a manse saved is sure to do his preserver some deadly injary. (It is a little sur- prising to find a girl "just entering her teens" able to steer a boat in a gale.) After this, her fortunes are bound up with those of the man she has saved. The story is but a poor affair. It has, as far as we can discover, inexplicable difficulties. How did it come to pass, for instance, that Elsie was younger than her brother, and yet the legiti- mate heir ? But it is written with a certain force and vivacity. If Miss "Annabel Gray" will study grammar, and net forget to correct her proofs, she may write something of some value hereafter.—e- ' Sidonie. By Mrs. Compton Ronde. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hull.)— We are introduced to some scones of high-life, and to some stones of low-life; and, of course, find out in the end that the characters in the two are somehow connected. Yolande, Countess of Llanorcost, is the connecting-link. An experienced novel-reader at once perceives that she is not what she seems, and is not surprised when he finds her leaving the mansion of the Earl, to meet a very vulgar " 'Arry " on the Thames Embankment. Then she has an aristocratic lover, whom she also meets in a somewhat unusual way. rn fact, she is quite the typical Countess of the sensational novel. But a sensational novel which produces no sensation beyond that of weariness, is not a suc- cess; and this has been our experience of Sidonie.—Lynton Abbott's Children, 3 vole. (Samuel Tinsley.)—We thought at 'first that we were going to have something' of a comedy in this book. There is something amusing in the old squire's foregone conclusion that all his children were to be sone, his plans for their disposal in life, his disappointment when the child turns out to be a girl, and his resolute attempt to ignore nature. But the gloom gathers on the story, as we proceed. The squire's second eon turns out to be a superlative villain, and before we come to the end we have a tragedy indeed. The book has its merits. It is written with care, and shows some thought and skill in drawing character in its author ; but it is not attractive, nor, on the whole, successful.
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