Kitty's .Rival. By Sydney Moatyn. 3 vols. (S. Tinsley.)" The
Surgeon's Secret" was Mr. Mostyn's last and, for all that we know, first novel, and was of no small merit. In some respects, Kitty's Rival is.not inferior to its predecessor. It must, however, be reckoned, as a drawback from its merits, that it has, unless our memory, sorely tried by the fertility of the writers of fiction, deceives us, a very similar plot. The story proceeds in a sufficiently interesting way, but without any startling difficulty, till Kitty—whose action, by the way, quite con- tradicts the theory that civilisation has extinguished the passion of revenge—discovers, or thinks that she discovers, the fact that the "rival" who has robbed her of the husband whom she had marked out for herself has another husband with prior claims. Such a character does indeed appear on the scene, and even deceives the persons most concerned. Then comes the familiar scene of extortionate demands and a terrified compliance ; and again, also, the question of casuistry, in the abstract so easy, and in the concrete so difficult, to answer, whether the newly-acquired knowledge must be acted on at once, How the heroine, whose sweetness and courage thoroughly enlist our sympathies, finds her way out of the difficulty, we shall leave our readers to discover. We may say this much of it, that it is a bold device, but that as it has been allowed in more than one famous play, it cannot well be condemned in a novel.
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