MARIETTE'S LOVERS. By G. B. Burgin. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d.)—The extreme
amiability of the author robs this story, as a story, of its sting. His affection for his virtuous characters is so lively that he cannot leave them a moment in peril, so the malignant have a poor time of it, living in per- petual discomfiture until they truly. repent or outwardly reform, and all is peace. Mariette is an amazingly good, beautiful, and dignified French Canadian, living in the remote village of Four Corners. She is loved by Johnny Armith- wayte, who flees from her because he wishes to be a priest, having committed the shameful act of kissing her, a crime for which he nobly atones by returning at the end of the story, after finding his long-lost parents, with an offer of marriage, though he has really lost his fickle heart to the daughter of a hundred earls, Lady Gertrude. Mariette does not need him; she has found a loftier lover in Roland Colquhoun, a distin- guished anchorite who develops into a baronet. Judge Lafontaine, with an evil past in Ottawa, would settle his debts with Roland's clay lands, and se ranger with Mariette ; Lady Betty would fain entrap her cousin Colquhoun. Both are foiled, and console each other. The plot exhibits many ancient tricks ; the characters soliloquize and make speeches most sententiously. But the Canadian setting is rather charming, and it is all so ingenuous, and good humoured, and high minded, that one imagines the story has an audience somewhere—perhaps of unworldly old ladies knitting in the sun.
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