My Child and I. By Florence Warden. 3 vols. (F.
V. White and Co.)—If Miss Warden has been setting herself to draw a picture of an ideally foolish woman, she must certainly be allowed to have succeeded in her aim. The heroine, Perdita by name, a good woman herself, has, it would seem, a quite unconquerable taste for bad men. In her chilhdood she has a great liking for a certain Lord Wallinghurst, who is decidedly no better than he should be. She takes for her first husband a man who by his own confession is a rascal ; and for her second, one who, without exactly being a rascal, is something of a ruffian. Bat her crown- ing folly is when she comes to identify a long-lost son—the baby- born of her first marriage has been taken from her and reported to be dead—with one Harry Dare. This same Harry is a most unmitigated scoundrel, a thief, a liar, even a murderer; and he turns out, in the end, not to be her son, but an illegitimate child of her first husband. And yet she continues to regard him with a fond affection. She finds her true son, who is a most estimable person ; but she bids us farewell with the words—" The scape- grace will fill my thoughts to the end, as he did on the first day when he thrilled my heart by calling me ' Mother ! ' " Miss Warden cannot be acquitted of having penned a gross libel on her sex, all the grosser because of the undoubted truth that there is in some of the characteristics of her heroine. Perdita is a genuine woman,—that it is easy to see. In fact, her personality is one of the best bits of work that Miss Warden has ever done. But could she have been so outrageously foolish ? To love this absolutely graceless villain, even when the natural bond turns out to be a fiction ! The story is not ill-contrived, and is told with no little force.
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