The Dead Prior. By C. Dudley Lampen. (Elliot Stock.)—This is
a pleasant, mildly exciting, but obviously juvenile book. Gilbert Aubrey, the wicked and irreligious doctor of Monkton Friars, and Henry Purcell, the weak and easily led organist of the Abbey Church there, conspire—being inspired thereto by Aubrey's sister, an unscrupulous and cold-blooded adventuress with whom Purcell fancies himself in love—to steal some plate that belonged to an old Prior of the Abbey, and which is buried in the deep-delved earth. But fortunately Aubrey is superstitious and nervous, as well as sceptical, and Purcell has a pretty and sensible daughter, who is engaged to a very good and sensible musician. And so they, helped by circumstances, succeed in baffling the plot. Aubrey is literally crushed beneath the weight of his own infamy, and Purcell, by confessing his share in a crime which somehow, and in spite of its seriousness recalls Hermann Doilsterswivel and Edie Ochiltree, escapes from the results of his weak criminality, and Edith takes to writing agnostic articles in magazines. The Dead Prior might conceivably have been worse than it is ; but it might also have been a good deal better.
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