The Future Marquis. By Catherine Childar. (Hurst and Blackett.) —This
is a readable story, having a certain vivacity and briskness about it which carry one on through the three well-filled volumes. If we are to look at it critically, however, we must remark that the author's ingenuity is most notably shown in the variety of misdeeds which she causes her personages to commit. The villain performs one outrageous freak, simply for the purpose of annoying his mother. The old lady has had an extraordinary baking of pies, tarts, and cakes, and all these her dutiful son in her absence orders to be brought into the drawing-room, where be strews them in horrible ruin over the floor for his doge to devour. His next exploit is of a more tragic kind, for he half murders a girl whom, having injured, he bates, by tying her to the back of his spring-cart, and then driving furiously over ferny and broken ground, until stopped by "the future Marquis" himself. The wicked heroine almost equals this hero in her choice of ill-deeds, but makes a kind of atonement for them, dying appropriately by lightning when it is time for her plots to be frus- trated. The good people of the book have little that is remarkable about them, except, perhaps, the delightful confidence of the hero, who, with no other training than what he has received at " the Slade School," undertakes that within six months he will paint a picture and sell it for £500,—and who keeps his word.
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