Gabrielle Vaughan. By Mary E. Shipley. (Seeley and Co.)—This volume
is tastefully got up, everything that binder and printer can do to render a book attractive has been done for it. The matter of it will please those who want a goody-goody story of a somewhat antiquated type. The key-note of it is struck by the first line of the motto on the title-page,---" Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever." The " sweet maid" of this story—we cannot call her a heroine—is Gabrielle Vaughan, one of an enormous family, residing at Hackney or thereabouts, but we have been unable to find any suitability to her or her friends of the remaining clauses of the said motto. They are moat of them good people, who let others who will be clever, but their noble deeds and " grand, sweet songs" are unchronicled and unsung here. Anything more respectably dull and conventional than their "life-stories" we never met with.
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