Deceivers Ever. By Mrs. H. Lovett-Cameron. (Chatto and Windus.)• —"
In that pleasantest of all pleasant bachelor retreats—the Albany— a young man, in a sumptuous blue-satin smoking suit, reclined in the soft depths of a luxurious arm-chair. The room was handsomely and tastefully furnished. There were comfortable chairs and low conches, and little three-legged tables, adorned with lace and worsted-work borders, that had assuredly been offerings from fair and feminine fingers. There were velvet-covered brackets, holding Dresden china figures, against the walls, and more Dresden china upon the mantel-piece ; and the subdued light came in, harmoniously shaded, through soft lace
draperies drawn across the windows It was eleven o'clock, and the table was covered with a snowy cloth, and all set out with a dainty blue-and-white breakfast-service. A soft-footed valet was," &o.„ &c., &c. Does any reader feel any inclination to know more of this gentleman, who addresses himself in bad French, cheats his best friend, deceives the girl who loves him, marries an heiress, and dies at a hotel, whet() his wife refuses to visit him, but whither the deceived one goes, escorted by the cheated friend, so that tho hero of the sumptuous blue- satin smoking suit and the three-legged tables may die "with his yellow head pillowed upon the bosom of the woman who had loved him so well ?" Dickens's Mrs. Wittitterly herself might find Mrs. Cameron's. style quite to her taste,—it is certainly " soft, deliciously soft." And the- book has a moral, too, though the gentleman of the yellow hair and the blue-satin clothes had no morals. It is valuable ; it is this,—blue-eyed mon are inherently deceitful. The blue-satin man had eyes to match, and " men who have eyes of that colour are predestined to break at least one woman's heart in the course of their lives." Be warned, ladies, either go for the brown eyes ; or, in the immortal words of Christy's- Minstrels, "bet on the grey."
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