The Squire's Courtship, By Mrs. Mackenzie Daniel. 8 vols. (Hurst
and Blackett.)—Mrs. Daniel's last book was " One Golden Summer," and her readers were not allowed to get to the subject of it till somewhere in the third volume. Here, too, we have the same peculiarity ; the " squire" is not the " squire" in the usual sense of that word before the two-hundred and twenty-fourth page of the third volume; nor do we find anything of real courtship on his part, waiving the question of whether he wits the squire or no, till we are very considerably advanced in the story. There is also this resem- blance to the 'miller novel, that the heroine is crossed in love, giving her heart to a man who is not worthy of it. And we may be allowed to suggest that the two maiden ladies, Miss Lucinda and Mies Penelope, One of them with a semi-mythical history of an attachment in the past,
bear a very decided resemblance to Dora's maiden aunts in " David Copperfield." On the whole, however, The Squire's Courtship may be pronounced an improvement on " One Golden Summer." The story is more vigorous, the characters are more interesting and better drawn. It would have been still better, perhaps, if the heroine had not been made to tell her own story. An it is, she seems somewhat affected and self- conscious, Was it, by the way, the earliest symptom of the distraction of love that so notable a housekeeper (for such is the character that we infer from her description of herself) ordered for a party of three a cod's head and shoulders, a haunch of mutton, and a couple of chickens. The superfluity of the fish she enlarges upon, but the more monstrous superabundance of the meat does not seem to strike her.
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