Mildred's Last Night: or, the Franklyns. By the author of
" Agges- den Vicarage," &c. (Bell and Daldy.)—A very pleasant, well-written, High-Church novelette, the object of which is, we imagine, to inculcate the necessity of " showing mercy with cheerfulness " in the govern- ment of a family. The story is well put together, and really contains a secret which is very fairly veiled from the penetration of the reader. Rigid sticklers for probability will, perhaps, object to such an incident as a young lady of twenty rushing up to Cambridge, bursting into a College meeting, and by her intercession saving her brother from impending rustication ; but the author of " The Franklyns" has succeeded in investing even this remarkable proceeding with a degree of vraisem- Mance of which we should scarcely have supposed it susceptible. The first title of the book appears to us to be somewhat arbitrarily chosen ; for Mildred is far from being the leading character in the story, and what her "last night " was is a question to which, after reading the work, we are quite unable to suggest a satisfactory answer. Nor were we prepared to find the well-known portrait of the Empress of Austria in the late International Exhibition, which we have always regarded as representing a very high degree of positive loveliness, cited as the exact likeness of a face which, though " soft, bright, sensible, and modest," is expressly stated to have had no pretensions to actual beauty.
Previous page
