A Constant Heart. By the Hon. Mrs. E. W. Chapman.
(Henry S. King and Co.)—Mrs. Chapman has taken some pains to give her story the local colour and the social tone of English country life, in the first half of the eighteenth century. She has " road-up " the period, and until she nears the close of the narrative, when she casts away such restraints, she adopts with some success the homely turns of phrase and the old uses of pronouns and adjectives which are to be found in the letters of ordinarily educated persons of that time. Perhaps she makes her heroine and her heroine's mother a little too ignorant in book-learning for their station in life, which was that of gentlefolk of old descent, though of diminished fortune ; but at least she makes them good and useful women, and gives a carefully-studied picture of the household discipline of • those days,—a picture at which young ladies who read her novel will doubtless stare. They will probably be amused also at the notion of a lady being carried off by a daring lover, in a coach and four, with an armed escort, and held in durance in "a castle in Cornwall ;" but Mrs. Chapman has authority for that seemingly wild flight of fancy. The book, without being remarkably clever, is interesting, and the lover, who has a constant heart, and dies of the supposed falsehood and
disgrace of his innocent lady-love, is really a fine fellow. His stedfaet- ness is a little too much intdstod upon, but it is abown as well as stated, and ono likes him. A strain of quiet, practical piety in the story which is refreshing, and altogether, A Constant Heart makes more impression, and that impression of a pleasanter kind, than one is aeons- tomed to derive from novels of the avowedly sentimental order.
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