Paid in Full. A novel in 3 vole. By Henry
James Byron. (Max- well and Co.)—Mr. Byron writes easily and pleasantly, and has produced a novel which is very readable, where he treats of a kind of life of which he has of course seen a good deal—life behind the scenes as viewed by a theatrical author. With the aristocracy he is less successful, because more conventional. The old wicked nobleman, with the soft-spoken valet who has sworn his ruin, because he seduced the girl whom the valet had loved in his early youth, is a kind of incident which is quite worked out. And Lord Glenburn is not in any sense rained by the valet, but by the rascality of his attorney and his own folly in marrying a very young woman of infamous parentage for her beauty, who of course runs away from him. Even the scuffle in which the peer kills Horace Bentley, his natural son, is in no way the work of the valet, whose sole achievement is to tell his master who Horace was. All this is very dull and melodramatic. Horace Bentley's own adventures—for, like all other novels, this, too, has a double plot—are far better done. He is apprenticed to a surgeon, marries his daughter, is turned out of doors, and takes to literature and farce-writing, does not treat his wife very well, who dies in child-birth, and so is killed by Lord Glenburn with perfect justice as administered in novels. This outline gives Mr: Byron an opportunity of describing, as we have said, a kind of life he knows well, and he avails himself of it. Horace's vanity, and conceit, and pecuniary shifts, and the flirtation with Miss Wellington are very well described, as is the character of Charley Tindal, the man who gets "a quasi-literary credit of a cheap order" mainly by vivacious talking and partnership with aspirants who do the work while he shares the profits Who has not lent Charley Tindal half a sovereign ? Bat though Mr. Byron does this sort of thing very well, he must remember that it is not the kind of life novel-readers, who are mostly women, care much about.
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