Sister May. By the Author of "Margaret's Engagement." 3 vols.
(Bentley.)—We should be glad to give Sister May higher praise than
our conscience permits us to accord to it. It is certainly well written throughout, and shows great advance in literary merit on the author's last work. The old maid, Miss Henny Hogge, for instance, is decidedly amusing, though we verge on caricature when we find her showing her
visitors her father's coffin, which she keeps in her sanctum (he had ordered and unfortunately outgrown it before his death), and in which,
as being a place that no ones dares to visit, she stores her bottled beer But the catastrophe of the story is too absurd. It is a sort of travestie of this irrepressible "Deceased Wife's Sister" question. The heroine's lover has been faithful to her through years of absence on the other side of the world, and comes back to claim her, when her beauty is, of course, somewhat faded. This makes no difference to his affection, but she has "Sister May" with her, not at all related in blood, an exquisitely beauti- ful girl of sixteen, and this young lady is to be with them. The gentle- man is afraid, and hints that, though at present perfectly heart-whole, he may fall in love with this irresistible beauty, and quietly suggests some other arrangement. On this the heroine falls into a furious passion, and dismisses the too diffident man. When we call the circumstance "absurd," we do not mean impossible ; absurd things happen often enough, bat then they do not come within the province of art ; a distinc- tion which novel writers are apt to forget. This is put in to give a char-
acter to the tale. In point of fact, it spoils it; the loves of the beautiful May, though she is rather insipid and foolish, with the heroine's own story, without a catastrophe, told in the easy and lively style which the author can command, would have been infinitely better.
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