Capital Punishment. A Tale of the Nineteenth Century. (Saunders and
Otley.)-11 a man buys Church property, turns a ruin into a smok-
ing-room, and goes to church only once on Sunday, the inevitable result will be that his son will be hanged as a murderer. We have with some trouble extracted this moral from the tale before us. The son apparently is hanged, though the process is not described, and we
presume he could not have been hanged without having been found guilty, though there does not seem to have been any evidence against
him, and though it appears to us very doubtful whether he really com- mitted a murder. But for this ending there might be something in the story, as the earlier parts have a few lively touches, and the whole is not unreadable. We would advise the author to change the name and the catastrophe, as neither of them has any necessary connection with the main stream of the story, and the book would be much better with- out them.
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