Walter Goring. By Annie Thomas. (Chapman and Hall.)--One of fi
Miss Thomas's stories of flirtation and intrigue, told with undeniable spirit, and a freedom which reaches the limit of the conventional. The world will one day perhaps be tired of reading about the emotions of half-a-dozen women, each of whom is in love with somebody she ought not to regard, but it is not satiated yet, and Miss Thomas serves up its spiced food in very piquant sauce. In this specimen she does something more. Daisy is a really original chaiacter, drawn with extreme care, and something of the affectionateness which indicates that the artist is conscious of succeeding in his task. We do not remember ever to have read, unless it be in Mr. H. Kingsley's Geoffrey Hantlyn, a better de- scription of the born actress—the girl who can never be natural, or being natural seems to be acting, who has only impulse for reason, and feelings for principles. She is a badly conducted young lady of course—we wish somebody would describe the well conducted one of the type—but her deep passionate love for her worthless friend, the cool intellectual courage with which she turns at bay, and the latent sympathy one always has with the mutineers against the humdrum regulations of life, extort from the strictest the forgiveness the author evidently feels for her own creation. If the novelist who sketched in that sullen, loving, half developed figure would consent to believe that probable adultery is
not the only possible motor of a story, she might give us something which would live beyond the season.
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