Forbidden to Marry. By Mrs. G. Linnatus Banks. 3 vols.
(F. V. White and Co.)—Mrs. Linnasus Banks writes realistic novels, not of the hideous kind with which M. Zola disgraces literature, but thoroughly wholesome and sound of tone. Lancashire life, as it was now nearly a centuty ago, is her theme. This time her scenes are laid now in Manchester, now in Chester, with the variation of some adventure in the Batsmen:I Forest, through which travellers between the two had in those days to pass. If she has a special object, it is to make her readers understand what a different thing school-life and apprentice-life were two generations ago to what they are now. But she knows better than to make any such object too prominent. Muriel D'Anyer, her heroine, is a very interesting person, and her love-story, though there is nothing very novel or remarkable about it, is sufficiently interesting. Lively little sketches of last-century man- ners are interspersed, and the whole effect of the scene, as Mrs. Banks has portrayed it, is remarkably natural and truthful. The title, we must remark, is not very happily chosen. There seems to have been no "forbidding to marry" but what was perfectly justified by Providence.
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