Farnorth. By Theo. Kennedy. (Chapman and Hall.)—If Mrs. or Miss
Kennedy could get rid of some affectations and the temptation to sensational incidents, e. g., a murder and a theft committed by a strong- minded young lady who had not the strength for either, and a possible but borrowed act of bigamy, she might write a good novel. She can conceive a good many characters, and delineate them so that they are not colourless, and invent possible yet interesting incidents, but Far- north is not beyond the ordinary level of circulating library novels, and in many points, as in the recurrence of certain tricks of expression, is below it. Mr. Harding is a good sketch, and his niece Clara something more, but the reader wearies of people who, like Alathea Snowe, Mrs.
Bland, and the Baronet, are mere caricatures, embodied qualities, or the poor or with priests. It was a noble though a wasted life, a life of peculiarities, or vices, and not human beings at all who talk as no one self-sacrifice and assiduous toil for an unselfish though erroneous end,, ever talked, and act much as marionettes do when their strings are and it deserved a better biographer than Father Pius, who chooses for
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