The Foreigners. By Eleanor C. Price. 3 vols. (Chatto and
Windus.) —Miss Price has made here a skilful use of a subject which, indeed, adapts itself readily to the necessities of a novel,—the contrast be- tween English and French ways of thinking in the matter of marriage- making. The young Marquis de Manlevrier has a match arranged for him by his mother, which will preserve and even increase the possessions of his somewhat decayed family. Then, in an unlucky hour, there comes to the town nearest to his ancestral chiltean an English family, a father, a mother, and a daughter, who is at once ac- knowledged as /a belle Anglaise. The young man at once loses his heart to her ; she, too, unknowing of the arrangement which had already ordered his fate, loves him. Then follow the complications, which Miss Price weaves with much skill into a most interesting plot. We can hardly help despising the Marquis, so wanting is he in what we think self-assertion, so incapable of even conceiving the idea that a maiden without a dot, of whom his mother disapproves, might yet possibly be his wife, and so generally helpless is he ; still, we recog- nise his tenderness and truth, and his humble, loyal submission to duty, as he conceives of it. There is a freshness as well as a grace about this novel which make it very pleasant reading.
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