Our Vicar. By Wynter Frore Knight, B.C.L. (Samuel Tinsley.)— Mr.
Knight undertakes to describe the sorrows of a high-minded curate, who is brought into relations with a vicar who is anything but high-minded. The author concedes in his preface that ho " has created, in the Vicar of Pollington, a being who has no real ex- istence." We may make his meaning plainer, by saying that the Vicar of Pollington is about as absurd and impossible a caricature as anything that we have ever seen in print. The result of this absurdity is that the whole effect of the book is spoilt. No one could over have acted as this creature is represented as acting ; and the re- sult is, as far as any result can be expected from a book so feeble, that genuine complaints are likely to be discredited. The novel appears to have, in a weak kind of way, the polemical pur- pose of discrediting forms of thought other than High Angli- canism. We leave the hero just beginning his novitiate with ." Father Bentley, at Milton ;" but an encounter with a young lady, just before he enters on his probation, gives us leave to doubt whether he will bring it to a successful end. We earnestly deprecate the author's intention of tolling us some- thing more about his impossible vicar, the Rev. Enoch Hatter. Some of Life's Lessons. By Mary Jefferies. (Remington.)—This is a book in which a story of a common-place kind is suddenly invaded by a most tragical element, a stop-mother fiercely contending—even to the point of murder—for the love of a man whom she had once re- jected. All this tragedy is really very feeble. The author had better have confined herself to describing the idyllic simplicity of a life of which one of the scenes is a lady keeping her company in "continual merriment" by her "famous store of riddles." Delightful facility of being amused !
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