MEN AND WOMEN, OR MANORIAL RIGHTS.
AN infatuated gambler and his amiable family, reduced to misfor- tunes, but succeeding to wealth through a murder—a village, with a gallant landlord, a seduced peasant-girl, a rustic love crossed by enlistment and military desertion, together with two murders, where the suspicion is directed to the innocent—are the chief materials of this novel. It is not without interest as a story ; and the narrative has a matter-of-fact kind of air. Except, however, in some of the rustic scenes and characters, the work seems rather the result of speculation than observation ; the incidents and persons belonging to a former age, as if taken from books rather than life. Even the best of the country-people, though true in themselves, are scarcely true in their connexion with the other circumstances.
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