Honour's Worth ; or, the Cost of a Vow. By
Meta Orrod. (Chap- man and Hall.)—This is a bewildering book. The heroine has a month "that gave one a curious feeling of quietude and self-control," which seems an impossible effect to be produced by any other person's mouth upon "one," until we discover that the author is superior to all trammels of grammatical analysis, and means that the grave-mouthed person impressed others with the idea of her own quietude and self- control. But Hermiono is very wonderful in more than that respect, for she has "dark violet eyes, and the lashes are much darker than the hair, though not so dark as the eyes," a hideous state of things, which we hope has seldom, if ever, been realised ; she likewise contrives to be dressed in deep mourning and shrouded in filmy lace at the same time, and to "resemble more than anything a swaying, plumy reed," which must have been a sad thing for her friends, to say nothing of her being able to lean back against the sloping panel of a deep window-seat, and clasp both her hands round her knees while so leaning, and musing upon her sad fate in being so "horribly rich." Sho is altogether a strangely gifted being, for on being introduced to Lady Dunstable, who is seventy-nine, and lame, and who walks by the aid of an ebony stick, she feels as though she had suddenly returned to the days of history, and saw before her the unhappy Marie Antoinette; of whom it may be said, in respect of the lameness, the stick, and the seventy-nine years, that "never did she have nor do in this Piljian's Projiss of a mortial wale," any more than Mrs. Gamp's young friend "performed beautiful on the 'arp." This amazing heroine has a young friend called Gladys, who likes a General's son, with hair "of that warns brown with almost blue shadows and gold lights "—a variety with which we thankfully acknowledge ourselves unacquainted—and they both know an artist, who, being half French, half English, talks to himself in curiously un- grammatical Italian, and "outlines" a face and bust from memory, with a hand that quivers and burns, while the colour deepens to carmine on his thin face. Carmine is liberally splashed about the whole book, and one individual has tho faculty, more marvellous than enviable, of flushing a deep crimson, while his noble brow is stained scarlet by that process. A sweet thing called " Josline " is wild about music, and is seemingly confused about Orfeo and Eurydice, for she inverts their rdles, and entreats that " Che farb sonza di to Eurydice" may be sung, though even then she might have put her verb right. This charming creature dies to slow violin music, and bids her English lover and her English friend farewell, the first in a quotation from a German poet, the second in a proverb in Spanish, than which what could we wish more natural, unaffected, and true to life,—and death ? A murder, a ghost, a quantity of upholstery and millinery, cud thoroughly unwholesome sentimentalism are the chief components of this silly book.
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