CURRENT LITERATURE.
Alirabi ; or, the Banks and Bankers of the Nile. By a Hadji of Hyde Park. (Blackwood.)—If this volume could be looked at simply as a story, it would probably be found entertaining enough by the ordinary reader. The adventures of Mrs. Chrysanthema Warwick, the lively and fascinating widow of a banker, with, or on account of, Alirabi, an officer in the Egyptian Army, who becomes her mad worshipper, are told with mach liveliness, although we think the incident of her running away with a baby crocodile is rather forced and farcical. Besides, we are not quite sure that Chrysanthema does justice to Alirabi. She gives him up, because be is accused of the murder of his senior officer, which is one of the most melo- dramatic episodes of the story. But his guilt is certainly "not proven!' The writer shows undoubted knowledge of Cairo, and of Bedouin and Coptic characteristics ; and there are in his pages some lurid revelations of domestic Egyptian life, and of the oppressed con- dition of the wretched Fellaheen. Yet the reader of Alirabi is uneasily
conscious all the time he is perusing it that he is being hoaxed by the author, that the book is a squib on the late military rebellion. in Egypt—as such, indeed, it looks as if it had been rather hurriedly prepared—and that he cannot find the key to it. There are passages in Alirabi of the kind popularly known as "graphic," which recall the style of more than one veteran author of the day. It may, indeed, be the first vigorous effort of a new writer, or a piece of somewhat "scamp work" by an "old hand" who delights in mystificatione.
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