CURRENT LITERATURE.
Mad: a Story of Dust and Ashes. By George Manville Fenn. 3 vols. (Tinsley.)—The book deserves, on the whole, something better than the very strange and we may say unattractive exterior that the caprice of the author or the publishers have given to it. The word " Mad" in letters of half an inch long, with something of the staring look that one sees in a lunatic's eyes, might deter a timid reader, while it will not fascinate any one. The story is very fairly readable, nor does it contain, taking the average of novels, any very unusual amount of horrors. Of madness especially there is very little indeed, scarcely anything beyond a scene of a page or so at the end, which one might fancy to have been added to justify the title. The criticism which first occurs to one the writer seeks to parry in his preface with the old plea of "truth stranger than fiction." But why should it not be used the other way, "that fiction should be less strange than truth '? This seems to be the true canon of art. Would a novelist, for instance, be justified in introducing a pair of Siamese twins into his tale Yet even if Mr. Fenn is to be allowed the main incident of his plot, a man yielding up his estate to an uncle on the simple assurance that. he is not legitimate, and finally recovering it by means of an entry in a pocket bible, there is something utterly indefensible in his episode of the will. The testator calls in a single witness to attest a will already signed. As one was a man of property and the other a doctor, it cannot be supposed but that they must have known such a document to be utterly invalid. Mr. Jarker, the villain of the plot, is a very black villain indeed ; but has not a very distinct character, for all that The last scenes of his life are drawn with considerable power. Matt Space, the rough, kind-hearted old printer, is the best thing in the book.
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