Till Death us Sever, by J. Lothian Robson (Sizupkin, Marshall,
and Co.), though a very unpleasant book, deserves to have a word of special notice given to it, because the earnestness which per- vades it, and renders it a novel with a purpose, is perfectly genuine. Mr. Robson gives both the plot and the purpose of his story thus in his preface :—" A woman endowed with everything which ought to bind to virtue, falls from it ; in her humiliation she encounters the Son of God ; being set up in the old place whence she sunk to perdition, and being weighted with every- thing which could drag her down again, she now traverses her slippery path with steady feet." In other words, Marjorie Lorraine leaves her husband, elopes with his bosom-friend, Harry Clinton, repents, and is taken back by her husband, who is a religious man after a fashion, though that is hardly the fashion of Scotland, of which he is a native. She ultimately leads a life of comparative happiness, saddened both by the memory and by the results of her sin, which cannot, of course, be entirely undone. The best part of this book is that which tells of Marjorie's experiences after her re-marriage,—her struggles against male insults, feminine censoriousness, and her own weakness. But, on the whole, the story is not only an unpleasant but an impossible one. Mr. Robson's style, too, is capable of improvement. The injured husband and the seducer rate each other in too melodramatic a manner.
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