A Strange Family. By C. Howard. 3 vols. (Skeet.)—Is it,
we feel -compelled to ask, any pleasure to write, for it is certainly no pleasure to read, about the sayings and doings of such a set of people as Mr. or Mrs. Howard (we do not feel inclined to make a conjecture or even a -guess as to the authorship) brings before us in this story ? To call them g‘ strange" is to use a very mild and euphemistic expression. A gentle- man who has committed murder, and has been so exceptionally fortu- nate as to be able to lean his victim against the door of his chamber in the Albany and make the world believe that he met his death by and- dent; a lady who has committed adultery, and inflicts upon herself the penance of lying in bed for the rest of her life ; a sleek, hypocritical eldest son, whose chief vice, or virtue—we cannot exactly say which— seems to lie in reading Terence to amuse his father, the aforesaid mur- derer; a very wild and foolish younger son ; and two passies daughters ; these constitute the family. Other people equally common-place or equally odious are mixed up with them ; a drunken and villainous baronet, a profligate young soldier who marries an extravagant hussy of s danseuse; sundry gossipping old women, and so forth. There is a plot of the usual kind ; two or three people turn out to be what no one took them for ; the bad people go to the bad, and the good, or, in default of good, the merely foolish people come into a large property.
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