Nortsrs.—The House of Lys; One Book of its History. By
Major. General W. G. Hawley. 2 vols. (Blackwood.)—Captain du Lys meets a maiden of low degree, and receives an impression which, if not actually that which 18 commonly described as "falling in love," is oertainly very like it. He, too, by his courtesy and kindness, touches the girl's heart, and becomes a hero, whose greatness she will be
rejoiced to view and worship from afar. But great changes are in store for her. Her low degree is changed. A moderate competence, and what is, in one sense of more importance, a pedigree, is found for her. The love-story, of which this is the outline, with its excellently told episode, the courtship of Lord Hardicanute, is a happy effort,—equal, we think, to anything of the kind which General Hamley has done before. There is another, and what we may call a more serious side to the story. Captain du Lys goes cut to the Crimea, an officer of the old type,—ignorant of his profession, and with no qualification for it, except the courage and the readiness in danger which courage, when it is of the cool, collected kind, always brings. What he learns there, and how he learns it, how, by a very severe discipline of failure, he is brought to see that a soldier's duty comprises much more than the mere readiness to fight, is well told in these volumes. The writer has got a subject here which is quite after his own heart, and deals with it very well.— Patty's Dream. By D'Aubig-ne White. 3 vols. (Remington.)— Regarded as a story of common life, in estimating which we have to consider ptobabilities, ,l,:c., this tale can scarcely hope to receive a favourable judgment. The relationships which bring about the vicissitudes are excessively complicated. If it is any credit to a novelist to produce a complete surprise, it will probably be allowed that the discovery of the third of the marquises to whom we are in- troduced, and the consequent fulfilment of the "dream," is wholly unexpected. After this, the reader would scarcely be surprised whomever he might find succeeding to the title and estates of Nether- leigh. Indeed, the faculty of surprise is pretty well exhausted by Mr. D'Aubigne White's inventions. Anybody may well be anybody's father or son, as the case may be. Even the stern old physician who comes down to see the first of the four Lord Netherleighs whose ac- quaintance we make in these volumes, does not escape the common lot, and is greeted by or has to greet a quite unexpected offspring. Bat for all this, Patty's Dream is quite readable. Parts of it, indeed, rise to a level higher than that of mere "readableness." The "foreign" Earl, with his habits and tastes so unintelligible to Netherleigh Con- servatism, is a clever picture. And "Mademoiselle Stella," both for the picturesqueness of her career and the genuine reality of her character, worthily fills the place of heroine.—Airy Fairy Lilian, by the Author of "Phyllis,"dm. 3 vols. (Smith, Elder, and Co.) We have an indistinct but generally favourable recollection of "Phyllis," but must honestly say that the novel before us has altogether dis- appointed our expectations. Lilian herself is reasonably well drawn and natural. We can praise nothing else. The story is really too trifling and common-place. There are a young guardian and award, and the usual attachment with the usual misunderstandings ; a mysterious widow, about whom we are permitted at one time to have serious misgivings, but who finally turns out as good as she is fair ; an un- scrupulous cousin, who wants to marry the guardian, and makes her- self disagreeable beyond all possibilities; and such other figures as are wanted for the necessary love-making. There is no kind of plot, unless we are to reckon as such the very feeble complication in which the widow is concerned. The only genuine sensation that the present writer got out of the three volumes, he found in the following passage :—" Cyril reads aloud to them decent extracts from the cele- brated divorce case, now drawing to its unpleasant close." The -" them " are his mother and a girl of eighteen. What a very strange after-dinner amusement ! Debetur pueris reverentia, it seems, but not eirginibus.
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