The New Godiva. By Stanley Hope. 3 vols. (Bentley and
Son.)— The author has the merit of making his plot perfectly intelligible. A gentleman, proud of a descent from an ancestor who, being then already
noble, came over with the Conqueror, marries beneath him. His own extravagance and the villainy of his man of business reduce him to
poverty, and his beautiful wife earns the money which is needed to keep him alive by sitting as a model. What rage possesses him when he learns the fact, and how he comes to a better mind, forms the main portion of the story. It would not have boon a bad plot for a novelette, but the material has to be spun out very much to furnish the substance of three volumes. And it is unnecessarily complicated, we think, by the fact which the reader knows all along that the wife is not in truth low-born. Without this we might not have had the sturdy digger from the Southern Hemisphere, but he, too, might have been spared without much loss. Mr. Stanley Hope has the art of being readable, and the printer, with clear type and ample margin, lends his aid.
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