The Rose Brocade. By Mrs. Philip Champion de Crespigny. (Eveleigh
Nash. 6s.)—The reader of this little romance will have a rather uncomfortable feeling that the author worked the story backwards from the dramatic moment in which the heroine declines to give evidence at the trial of the hero, on the ground that, unknown to him, she is legally his wife. The beginning of the novel must provide some tolerably. credible explanation for this state of things, and the prefatory letter seems to have been Invented after the crisis was decided on, instead of the crisis being the natural and inevitable consequence of the opening of the book. The whole story is slight, though it would be unfair to deny that it is readable, or that Mrs. de Crespigny has a certain graceful facility in describing the picturesque days of powder and patches.
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