13 JUNE 1891, Page 23

A Modern Marriage. By the Marquise Clara Lanza. (W. Heine-

mann.)—Why a "modern marriage" P The story seems to us a very old one, though the circumstances are modern. Substitute a minor poet for Paris, and a pretty woman who wants to spend more money than her husband can give her, for Helen, and a struggling literary man for Menelaus, and you have the characters of the drama enacted in those pages. We have always been afflicted with this kind of thing in the past, and we shall probably be yet more afflicted with it in the future, now that the Ibsen mania has set in. Put this novel into the form of a play; and you have a very fair specimen of what Messrs. Archer and Co. so passionately

admire. •