Heavy Stakes : a Novel. (Charing-Cross Publishing Company.)— The odd
thing about this story is that its author should have limited himself to one volume. There seems no possible reason why it should not have been three, or for that matter, four or five. The writer has an uncommon power of making bricks without straw, and of expanding the infinitely little, and we wonder he could have exercised it so sparingly. The tale can hardly be said to have a beginning, it cer- tainly has no end, to speak of; and instead of the customary" finis," the book should be concluded with "left speaking," for the characters do little else but speak all through the book. The only spasm of incident is when a respectable gentleman, who has mourned his wife as dead and otherwise demeaned himself as a widower for some eighteen years, accidentally stumbles upon his long-lost spouse in a railway carriage. He is naturally startled, but the anonymous author so contrives his narrative that no experienced reader shares his surprise. Upon the loves, travels, ambitions, and mistakes of this singular couple, and some half- dozen other persons, who equally share the burden between them, the story, such as it is, will be found to turn. They are all of them per- fectly uninteresting (with the exceptions of Miss Amherst and Kate Cotton), harmless, and "drab-coloured" people, whose affairs will never cause anybody a moment's "pulsation." The style is wretchedly slipshod, there are some curious examples of grammar and punctuation, and the title of the book is absolutely meaningless.
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