The Demoniac. By Walter Besant. (J. W. Arrowsmith, Bristol.)—This is
Mr. Arrowsmith's Christmas Annual for the current year; and a very pretty little Christmas gift it is ! We have no liking for the maudlin sentimentality of some stories which find an excuse in the season for their silliness ; but the silliest of them is to be preferred to this. Could not Mr. Besant give his reader something more appropriate ? George Atheling is a healthy, temperate, well-conducted young man. Suddenly he is seized by the demon of drink. A dreadful thirst, the cravings of which it is impossible to resist, comes upon him without any warning whatsoever, and continues to attack him at regular intervals, till the miserable wretch puts an end to his own life. A more dismal story we have never seen. To complete the horror of it, Mr. Besant has added the squalid meanness of the middle- class family from which George Atheling, who leaves his friends under pressure• of his awful trouble, takes a wife.
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