How We Learned to Help Ourselves. By Lalla McDowell. (Christian
Hook Society.)—This is a good story of how a family, reduced by an adverse turn of trade to poverty, learned to dispense with the luxury and ease to which they had been used. It would be better, if the author had not mixed up with it things not strictly belonging to it, and had not given it too didactic a tone. Besides this, the odious people are too odious. The vulgarity and insolence of Mrs. and Miss Dawson, friends of-prosperous days who are altogether changed by adversity, are grossly exaggerated. Some people, indeed, are capable of being quite as sas-mereenary and mean, but the very slightest veneer of manners—and so much these people must have had—prevents them from making such a display of their baseness. The unfortunate are dropped, not affronted, ley society.
Previous page
