The Love of Richard Herrick. By Arabella Kenealy. (Hutchin- son
and Co. Gs.)—Miss Kenealy has boldly taken an utterance of one of her own characters as the motto of her book,—a species of topsy-turvy dealing which giddily recalls the old riddle about the owl and the egg. Is is her custom, Miss Kenealy gives us a comedy of manners in The Love of Richard Herrick, — a cumbrous title, in which, moreover, the noun might have been put in the plural. If Richard Herrick has in the strict sense only one love, he acquires both a wife and a, mistress in the course of the story, which, however, ends satis- factorily with his marriage to the real love. One is always amused by Miss Kenealy, but on this occasion it is impossible to help wishing that she had not used her characters so often as phonographs to air her views on that tedious subject, the posi- tion of women. Nature settled the main position of women once for all at the birth of Cain. But, apparently, it is impossible to induce the modern novelist to believe this. How- ever, the reader (though, unfortunately, not the conscientious reviewer) can skip most of these dissertations ; and otherwise the book is read-able and amusing, and the heroine (the true love) is a very charming creature.
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