Friends and Lovers, by Annie Thomas (White), contains a really
wonderful number of vulgar characters, who use language worthy of them. Among them are a Lord Charldale, who is, till about the last page of the story, a habitual drunkard, and endeavours to get through a marriage ceremony in a state of intoxication ; a Lord Timerton, who foams and fumes, and has a habit of breaking out on his wife with "what the deuce ;" and a Lady Victoria Gardiner, who has a "gay and debonnaire way of kicking her heels over all social traces," has a little" bijou nest" at Barnes, styled " The Keg," and writes of a couple about to be married that they are "greatly beasts." Even the better. heartedamong Mrs. Cudlip's "Friends and Lovers "—the Dons, and the Trixies, and the Sylvertres—might well be a little more refined in speech and motive. The plot of the story is poor, and the characters do not bustle about with as much animation as this author gener- ally endows her marionnettes with. Altogether, she has probably never written more hurriedly, or to less purpose.
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