Faneswood. By Henry Salon Wheler. (Digby, Long, and Co.) —This
is a strange, ill-compacted, but yet not dull or uninterest- ing story of life in college and country-house, by an author who, although he is almost too obviously a tyro, is nevertheless not without literary power of a kind. If he had had a little more experience, he would have refrained from retelling the too familiar story of undergraduate drinking and high-jinks. With a little more sense of proportion, he would not have sketched the dubions hero of Faneswood as "at times noble-minded ; with the good, good; with the evil, evil ; now plunged in the deepest melancholy, now careering along in the best of good spirits ; unstable when not great; when great, equal to the best ; when debased, lower than all in his intellectual depravity." Yet it must be allowed that several of the characters in the etory—this unsatisfactory hero, his unnatural father, his almost incredibly self. sacrificing mother, and Sybil Faunce, an adventuress, who is a compound of Blanche Amory and Becky Sharp—are really well sketched. Promise, rather than performance, is the distinguishing feature of Faneswo od.
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