Eberhard ; or, the Mystery of Rathsbeck. By Katherine Clive.
(Tinsley Brothers.)—The author of this grotesque story deserves some credit for the originality of her plot and for the industry she has displayed in the development of it, though certainly for nothing else. It is a new thing to mix up the fortunes of English girls of the ordinary middle-class type with those of German students —" Hear Pastors" and "Herr Professors "—who speak dubious English, and are susceptible in the extreme. This very Irish-stew of love and examinations, and the " mystery " which forms the centre of it, are all so absurd indeed as to suggest that there may be in them that truth which is stranger than even nineteenth-century fiction. There is one character in the story, Filalein Schwarzkopf, who keeps a German educational establishment at Rathsbeck, and who is so odious from beginning to end that we cannot help thinking her portrait must have been drawn from life ; it is quite superfluous on the part of the author to tell us that "never yet had the lightning- flame of glorious, God-given thought flashed through her." If Miss Clive would concentrate her energy and enthusiasm on some simple plot, give up soaring into "prose-poetry," eschew digressions and marks of exclamation, and have no literary dealings with "young tradeswomen of rather questionable character," she would do much better as a novelist than she has done in Eberhard.
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