3 AUGUST 1889, Page 24

Dr. Ramsay.. By Georges Ohnet. Translated by Mrs. Cashel Hoey.

(Chatto and Windus.)—A certain number of English readers are probably acquainted with this tale in the original. Mrs. Cashel Hoey's admirable translation will introduce it to more general notice. It is a powerful story, but one which does not wholly approve itself to us. Rameau is a surgeon full of the feeling of duty, but an atheist, who marries a believing wife. She is unfaithful to him, and this is the somewhat paradoxical way in which he is himself brought to believe. She lays the blame of her sin on the scepticism which had ridiculed her faith; but we cannot see that it had anything to do with it. She seems never to have ceased to believe, after her own fashion. But it was a belief dissociated from morality, too common in some natures. M. Ohnet doubtless means well, and thinks that he has a lesson to teach ; but we could wish that he had not "sugar-coated " his didactic pill for the French public with this episode of adultery_