Carillon's Year. By the Author of "Lost Sir Massingberd." Two
vols. (Bradbury and Evans.)—The story opens well. A rescue from the tide, at a place which is to be identified, we suppose, with the sands of Morecambe Bay, is told with much graphic power. We find nothing afterwards, it is true, equal to this, and the plot is of a very ordinary kind ; nevertheless, the interest is fairly sustained. The meaning of the title is that Mr. Carlyon has a year allotted as the utmost space of his life by a doctor who has discovered heart disease in him—a tragical situation, which the writer works with some skill. The character of Carlyon himself, a manly, noble nature, not incapable of faith, but driven into scepticism by the evil which ho has soon cloaked under the pretence of religion, is well drawn and without extravagance. We can hardly say as much for that of the Carlyon pere, as he is described to us by the hero, the old hypocrite who glories on his deathbed in his successful deceit, and recommends his son to follow his example ; nor for that of Mr. Puce, the toadying vicar, who, when the wicked old nobleman pays his annual visit to church, preaches a sermon against poaching. Agnes Crawford is a heroine of the ordinary angel type. The style is good but pitched a trifle too high, as when we read of Agnes praying for the hero that "her small, white hands were wedded in vicarious supplica- tion." But it is fair to say that we have not met with anything else so bad as this.
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