CURRENT LITERATURE.
NOVELS AND TALES.—Patty's Partner. By Jean Middlemass. (Tinsley Brothers.)—We do not object to an honest and above- board imitation of Dickens, each as we find in all the novels of Miss Middlemass, just as we used not to object to Mr. Sketchley's Mrs. Brown, although she had been first heard of as Mrs. Gamp. Miss Middlemass " studies " her great ladies, her Frenchmen, and her eccentric characters, after Dickens, and she does not do it badly. Patty's Partner is a readable story, with some clever " character " sketches, and a not unattractive picture of middle-class manufacturing life in England.—Odd or Even ? By Mrs. Whitney. (Ward, Lock, and Co.)—The peculiar difficulty that besets us in the reading of a certain class of American novels makes itself severely felt in the case of Odd or Even? Everybody is so desperately self-conscious, the talk is so very " tall," the local colour is so unfamiliar, and the phraseology has such an uncomfortable effect —no doubt, because we are narrowed by our habits of " dialect "— that the effort to follow the fortunes of Israel Heybrook, the prince of ploughmen, and France Everidge (one longs for the s, but must not have it), the "drawing-room girl" (this is one of the elegancies of English undefiled), is like that which Martin Chuzzlewhit made to follow Mrs. Hominy. The story is not very dull, and the people are not, on the whole, objectionable; but it is hard work to read it, because it is suffused with pretentiousness, and conveys the idea that the author's aim is to express what she means in the least ordinary, the farthest-fetched words she can find. Here is a specimen sentence :—" Do not think, girl-reader, that I am asserting or imply- ing that in the world of wealth and elegance there are not women of lovely life, who wear these things as they wear their clothes, because they are there to pat on, and it does not lie in their way to use home- spun ; but close to and intermixed with the range of such lives, that simply grow where they were put, realising the greater demand laid upon them because their outward things are made easy and beautiful, there is a little under-world, that makes a sacking and a business of its uprising into the externalities in which alone it discerns the life above it, verily supposing it to stir and feel only in its cuticle as itself does ; that strives for the putting on, not the putting forth, for the raiment, and not the righteousness that may be in the raiment ; not knowing that to find the first shall be to have the clothing of it in the things' that the Father sees are needful for its most beautiful revelation." —Bevis : the Story of a Boy. By Richard Jefferies. (Sampson Low and Co.)—The only drawback to the pleasure with which readers who are not boys will follow the delightful adventures of Bevis and Mark in a kingdom of imagination, where all the objects are real and all their uses fanciful, is the apprehension that readers who are boys may fail to appreciate to the full what Mr. Jefferies has done for them. In his finely minute, real, and yet poetical portraiture of nature, his close and friendly intimacy with the animal world, his easy knowledge, so enviable, so fascinating, of the face of the earth, and all that grows and lives upon it, Mr. Jefferies is " without a rival or an equal," the Kean of that stage of whose representations we are never weary. All his well-known qualities are combined in this book, and it exhibits some others which are new to us,—exuberant imagina- tion, and a gravely humorous sympathy with the fancies and the ways, the good points and the defects, of the very best kind of boy. The Catamaran, the Council of War, and the Battle of Pharsalia ought to live long, among the healthy, happy, humorous conceits of an observant lover of nature, who has a great kindness for human nature also.—The Bankers of St. Hubert, and Other Tales. By Sylvanns Ward. (Remington and Co.)—The first and most important of these tales is merely a frame in which to place a picture of the oddities and defects of the local laws of St. Hubert, an island which we take to be Jersey. There is no striking originality about the frauds to which the bankers of St. Hubert resort to sustain their failing credit, but the story is tolerably inter- esting, and ingeniously contrived to exhibit an anomaly which ought to be abolished.—Cosmo Gordon. By Mrs. Leith Adams. (Chap- man and Hall.)—A greater and more annoying fault than the absence of humour, is the assumption of it. Mrs. Leith Adams labours under the former disability, in common with the great majority of lady- novelists, and she is also a terrible example of the latter. Her most extravagant stories are stupendously hill as well, and Cosmo Gordon is no exception. It is a book to be forgotten, anywhere that one might leave off in the reading of it, although the hero, who goes about muttering "Ma reine, ma reine ! " is "a rather blasé-looking man," but "a fearless and gallant soldier," a "rara avis in terris ;" while the quality of the heroine may be estimated by the following descrip- tion of her demeanour while a pair of ponies are running away, with herself and the rara avis in the carriage behind them :—" Was death coming, Margaret thought, in some swift, awful form ? She felt no fear, no wonder, was conscious only of a feeling of quiet thankfulness in that this peril was shared together." So much for the author's notion of the sweetly natural. Her notion of the humorous is to call two little birds in a nest "twin ornithological specimens," and to describe a dog who has stolen a fowl ready for cooking as "a con- vulsed mass of white fur [!], holding madly on to a chicken's body." Of course, there comes a time when the lovers are happily reunited, and what can be more natural than that an Englishman, meeting the girl he loves, " after long grief and pain," should "gather her in his arms," and " murmur " to her, "Ma reine, nothing shall ever part ns more ! " and that she should reply, " Never, men roi!" The latter, indeed, is a happy thought, for the heroine has not been in the habit of talking French to the circumambient air.— Fetters of Memory. By Alfred Leigh. (Remington and Co.)—This is a pretty story. The phrase looks common-place and meagre, but says exactly what we mean, and no other would say it. The author has no very remarkable power, but he possesses facility and good- taste. There is no bad grammar in the book, and most of the people are respectable ; there is not much plot, but it is developed with care, and the pretty young lady whose various fortunes it brings at last to a prosperous condition is very superior to the ordinary novelist's young lady of the period.—Under the Downs. By Edward Gilliat, M.A. (Sampson Low and Co.)—This is a pleasant novel, not very skilfully put together, but readable and lively. There is no great originality about the device by which Mr. Norman Valence's bride is driven to run away and hide herself from him on their wedding-day, but the manner of the restoration of the young couple to faith in each other and their subsequent fresh start are decided novelties. We wish the author had not given his vulgar, rich, cruel baronet such a horrid name as Tripe, for, after all, the beautiful long (why does Mr. Gilliat use the accent ?) has to bear that name when she marries him, and her son inherits it. Sir James Tripe's fate is a satisfactory piece of poetical justice. Norman Valence is a prig, and not a blame- less one, until he is converted ; but his priggishness is used with effect to bring out the convictions of the author on various questions of the day, and yet not to the detriment of the story, as a story. —The Price She Paid. By Frank Lee Benedict. (White and Co.) —Mr. Benedict has not realised the promise of his remarkable novel, "St. Simon's Niece." He has written nothing since which we could heartily admire ; and though his present novel is in every respect an improvement upon its predecessors, it falls short of what we ex- pected from this writer, who made his mark by one book at a time when American novelists were almost unknown in England. The Price She Paid has the merit of being a story of life in America ; we are not deeply impressed by the charm of "P. French," as the heroine thinks it witty to call herself, and there is too giggling and spasmodic a sprightliness about the perpetual talks, for our taste ; but the story is cleverly contrived, and the moral atmosphere of the book is fresh, bright, and pleasant. We get glimpses of-a kind of country life and of social relations very unlike anything within our own experience, and the closing chapters are admirably written. The artistic merit of the book has suffered by the obli- gatory quantity of "copy." — Daisies and Buttercups. By Mrs. J. H. Riddell. (Bentley and Son.)—Mrs. Riddell's very silly selection of a title for her novel, which is by no means silly, is to be regretted ; it makes one open the book with distaste. The author of " George Geith " ought not to be- tempted to walk in the foolish ways of the authors of " Comin' Through the Rye," and "All Among the Barley." This book is not one of Mrs. Riddell's best ; it conveys somehow the impression that her personages are not clearly visible to her, and that she is but languidly interested in them. The first volume is the best, and the narrator of its story, Mr. Cheverley, the most lifelike and most dis- tinctly characterised figure in it.—Leone. (Triibner and Co., London ; Osgood and Co., Boston.)—This is a volume of the " Round- Robin Series," handy-sized books, beaiing "a strange device" —the original Round Robin, we presume—with the legend, "Perhaps it may turn out a song, perhaps turn out a sermon," a vista of un- certainty that reminds us of Ruth Pinch's beefsteak-pudding, which might, she feared, turn out to be not so much a pudding as " a soup, or a stew, or,—or something." The particular volume before us con- tains neither a song nor a sermon ; it is a story of very hazardous adventure among artists and brigands in Italy. The celebrated bandit who devotes his leisure to the peaceful calling of a painter's model is an original and interesting personage, and the author has contrived a very pretty love imbroglio out of the situation. The style is occasionally crude, but the story is well conceived and the characters are well drawn. —Out of the Shadows. By Crone Temple. (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.)—This is a nice little book, and we hope there are many good little girls who will read it with both pleasure and profit. It is not too pietistic, and its sentiments are all sound.—Born. to Luck. (Remington and Co.)— Evelyn Joyce is the fortunate person who fits this title, and it must be said for the chronicler of her history that no labour has been spared to make her fit it well. The story is most improbable, but it lacks the charm that a lofty and rich imagination can confer on improbability. The persons who undergo the vicissitudes of fortune which the reader follows with but languid interest are, with one exception, poor creatures, mean of motive and in action ; the exceptional person, Charity Joyce, is too close and unvarying an illustration of that Christian virtue whose mute she bears. The treatment of the story is too thin to be artistic; nevertheless, there is a promise of better things in Born to Luck. —Hearts of Gold. By William Cyples. (Chatto and Windas).— Unless Mr. Cyples is of the opinion once expressed by a talented Irishman that a man's language is his own, and grammar has no right to interfere with it, we hope he will consider the claims of ortho- graphy and syntax a little more liberally in his future literary pro- ductions. " Transmittible " does not meet the popular views of spelling, and the following sentence might serve as a specimen of the misuse of pronouns :—" Barbara was in Clara's confidence in this wooing matter, and it may possibly be that she was influenced by a dreamy intuition of something of the same kind awaiting herself, that she had, wonderful to record, made no mischief out of it." Presumably, " a dreamy intuition of something of the same kind availing herself," means that "Clara" thought it likely she should have a "wooing matter" of her own to confide to somebody, one day. We can only say that we have never seen that universal and laudable expectation of all the Claras of fact and fiction so clumsily expressed. We cannot say much more for the story of Hearts of Gold than the style says for itself.
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