Regent Rosalind. By the Author of "The Wynnes." (Samuel Tinsley.)—It
is pleasant to moot with a book of so " old-fashioned " a type as Regent Rosalind,—old-fasbioned in the sense of being cool, quiet, sedate, and unpretending, like the lavender-silk gowns and the black-silk modes of our grandmothers. It is to be hoped that there exist even now a certain number of young persons whose taste is suffi- ciently unvitiated to permit them to read this simple story—written in unusually good English, and which deals with nothing out of the Way of the homely life of thousands of English middle-class homes--:with appreciation and interest. The " situation " is not a novel one; we have made the acquaintance of a great many young ladies on their leaving school " for good," and taking up their position as mistress of a widowed relative's household, and we have generally been interested in them, even when they have not been such imposing personages as Mrs. Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks, or Mr. Trollope's Mary Thorne. Miss Yonge's responsible young people are indeed too virtuous, too self-conscious, and too full of a technical kind of scrupulosity, to interest us ; but even for them we feel concerned when the " Dairy Chain " seems quite endless, and the "Pillars of the House " are thirteen. The author of Regent Rosalind has drawn a bright, honest, lovable, pleasant girl's portrait for us, and the accessories are all natural and well developed. There is no great inventiveness displayed in the story, the meddling friends, the manageable brothers, the troublesome brother—apt to get into scrapes, and difficult to be got out of them because he won't tell, or, if he does, won't tell all—the weak and vacillating lover, who is replaced by the exemplary young man, on whose morals there is not a stain and who thoroughly knows his own mind; these are all tolerably familiar to us, as belonging to the old-fashioned school of conscientious and improving fiction. We are, however, as we have said before, very glad to meet them again, and have read Regent Rosalind—rather a silly title—with a sense of restful pleasure.
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