The .Normans; or, Kith and Kin. By Anna H. Drury.
2 vols. (Chapman and Hall.)—The plot of this story turns upon the point of a wrongful ownership of property. This strikes us, we are bound to say, as being the weakest part of the work. One looks with something of suspicious incredulity on such incidents as a long-lost will turning up among a bundle of old documents and being burnt by the rightful hoir. We arc always sorry, in truth, when Mims Drury takes us away from her pictures of life, drawn as they always are with freshness and grace, to go on with the course of her narrative, with the outside history, so to speak, of her characters. In dealing with their inner history she never writes anything that is not natural and truthlike. The free-spoken old maid, "Money Musk ;" the high-spirited parson hero Frank Norman, a study which we recommend to Mr. Galion, as combining, in ideal, at all events, manliness and piety ; and the bravo-hearted heroine, Caroline, whose story is made to point a very fine, though a very painful moral, are all vigorous and lifelike sketches. Altogether, tho Normans is a tale to be read.
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