The Ill-Tempered Cousin, by Frances Elliott (F. V. White and
Co.), is a far from satisfactory performance, even as three-volume fiction now-a-days goes—all the less satisfactory that its author shows here and there a power of sketching character, to which, however, she does but scant justice. The " ill-tempered cousin," Sophia Escott, is in reality a poor, morbid, half-mad creature who loses her love, and ulti- mately her life, from insane jealousy and general impracticability. There is a great air of unreality about her ; and there is something worse than unreality about a certain Miss Sterne, a young lady with peculiar antecedents, who acts as companion to Mrs. Maitland, the mother of the hero of the story, and, almost as a matter of course, cherishes a feline love for that eligible young man. Mrs. Elliott is more
successful and more agreeable when she sketches the life of certain vulgar-minded folks of the suburban-villa order in Twickenham.
Louis Winter, a German who talks the most atrocious English, whose views on the subject of meum and tuum are those of Harold Skimpole, and who is yet good-natured and even amiable, is on the whole well drawn.
It would be positively charitable to suppose that A Woman's Revenge, byLily Tinsley (Tinsley Brothers), is not so much a novel as the skeleton of a melodrama, but thinly clad with narrative. It is a collection of impossibilities, alike of character and of incident. Sir Robert Drew is an impossible English baronet, and marries—or buys from her father —an impossible Italian wife. There is also in the story some wildly improbable nonsense about the doings of secret societies ; and of the form of the fiendish " revenge " which the wife takes on her hue. band for supplanting her poor lover, the less said the better. But there is abundance of " go " in the story ; the murders, duels, and suicides are too numerous to mention ; and Miss Tinsley fairly sends all the characters—whom she does not kill—not to bed, but to Bedlam. There is, too, a good transpontine ring about such a speech as this :—" You shall marry me, Robert Drew, that I, Inez de Ferment°, whom you dragged up from the dirt to satisfy your revenge, may drag you down to poverty for mine—drag you lower than I was when you put your hated gold between this man's life and mine."
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