Wedlock and its Skeleton Key. By Hope Huntly. (Sampson Low
and Co.)—The plot of this story is not quite so unpleasant as its forbidding and pitiably grotesque title would indicate, but it is not one to be chosen by a writer of sense or taste. The craze that has come over all sorts and conditions of novelists to have some nastiness or unpleasantness in their stories has infected, of course," Hope Huntly." One used to read the novels of tenth- rate writers, if only to amuse oneself with a highly improbable and idle but not unhappy existence ; but since there must be a skeleton in everybody's cupboard, even this trifling relaxation is denied to us. For the rest, all the characters are overdrawn—Benjy does not raise a smile, so absurd and improbable is his dialect— and he is far too comic a personality to laugh at. We felt that Wedlock, &c., was a mistake, when accidentally turning over the pages we saw the quotation, " Nothing but Infinite Pity," &c., and shut the book up at once as a bad case.
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