24 MARCH 1883, Page 25

My Beautiful Daughter, by Percy B. St. John (J. and

R. Maxwell), is fall to overflowing of old-fashioned love-affairs and villainies, and is written in crisp paragraphs, on an average not more than two or three lines in length. Mr. St. John's villains are all arrange. ments in the blackest of black, and he harries over his ground like the "Flying Dutchman," till Rupert Leslie, the "superior fiend" of the whole, is stabbed, gets a glass of brandy, and dies. The effect of the harry on the reader is rather bewildering, but not unpleasant.