Sylvia Saxon. By Ellen Melicent Cobden. (T. Fisher Unwin. 6s.)—The
title-page of Miss Cobden's study of second-rate society both deceives us as to the nature of her wares and underestimates their value. She calls her book "episodes in a life," but gives us very few episodes, and at least a dozen detailed portraits, enough drawing of character for a dozen separate novels. Sylvia herself, who is educated to the indifferent extravagance of newly made riches, who marries a drunken loafer, and loves another man, is by no means the most interesting of the figures which crowd the stage, and we should especially like to hear more, at a later date, of Mrs. Marriott. The writer's gifts of intuition and of observation are remarkable; her work somehow recalls to us a certain etching of a garden, of a group of little people, accurate and yet not inspired, and we are roused from the contemplation of it with something of a shock by the incongruous tragedy of the last few chapters. The chief fault of the book is an absence of plot and of events which are independent of the moods of the heroine. We are vexed, moreover, by Miss Cobden's trick of going back to account for the presence of each character, leaving us with a feeling of constant hindrance and of inability to arrive at any further
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