The Penance of Portia James. By "Tasma." (W. Heinemann.) —Does
the "penance" begin with the end of the book, or have we been reading about it when we came to this end P It is not easy to say. Portia, betrothed almost in her childhood to John Morrison, has not courage to shake herself free when her heart tells her that she does not care for him, and does care for some one else. Then comes the wedding, and then on the same day the discovery that her newly-married husband has not been faithful to her. That is the complication which makes the motive of the tale, a tale better in the working-out of its details, we think, than in its general conception. Portia is drawn with no little subtlety, and Harry Tolhurst is a fine study. John Morrison we do not understand. The sketch of life in the Quartier Latin is forcible. What, we may venture to ask, is meant by "a chapter of Aurora Leigh'" P Is it possible that " Teams " does not know that "Aurora Leigh" is a poem, divided, after the manner of poems, into books P
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