Fenton's Quest. By the Author of " Lady Audley's Secret."
3 vols. (Ward, Lock and Tyler.)—We have always thought, and once or twice
taken occasion to say, that 'sensationalism' is not by any means the worst fault of the modern novel, and that Miss Braddon, quite apart from any question of her literary ability, is a distinctly moral writer,
just as the drama to which her fiction corresponds is distinctly moral. Fenton's Quest is perfectly decorous, and it certainly needs no apology on the score of sensationalism. Some of the stock incidents in which that class of writing delights do indeed appear, but they could not, one thinks, rouse any emotion even in the freshest mind. And there is a plot, bat the most inexperienced of novel-readers at once discerns the clue. When we compare this very thinly woven stuff with
what we once got from the same hand, those effects, now worn so.
threadbare, with such a splendid dramatic situation as that in "Henry Dunbar," where the daughter after long effort forces her way into the
murderer's presence, and finds her father, we can do nothing but repeat the stock censure of the critic, and cry, " What a falling off !" Thera is 2 carelessness in the details which, of itself, shows the hasty slovenly work. There was a time when Miss Braddon, who unquestionably is, or has been, an artist of a certain sort in her time, would not have admitted such an inaccuracy as this, " Gilbert went into a shop in Goodge Street and purchased a Bradshaw. There was a train leaving Euston Square for Liverpool at a quarter to eleven." Observe the minuteness in names of streets, &c., and then the unheard-of time for a night train to Liverpool And she would have known, or at least taken pains to learn that a man sauna by will order his "real estate to be sold and the entire proceeds de- voted to the erection of an additional wing for Maleham Infirmary." Why, ,very one has at least three circulars a week from charitable institutions instructing one that legacies must be left out of personal property. Nevertheless, when all has been said, Miss Braddon even at her worst,— and this is, we think, the worst that we have seen—is better than many.
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