Ifauntings. By " Vernon Lee." (W. Heinemann.)—" I want to make
your flesh creep," was the expressed wish of a well-known character in fiction when he was about to unfold his tale. Possibly this is not the aspiration of "Vernon Lee" when she tells her "fantastic stories," as she calls the four strange tales which are included in this volume. Whether this be so or no, we can vouch for the effect not being produced in our own case at least. "Amour Dare" and " Oke of Okehurst " are curious counterparts of one another. In the first, Spiridion Trepka, Pole by birth and German Professor by occupation, evokes out of the past a certain Medea da Carpi, one of the weird figures of medival Italy, a very Lamia of a woman, and goes through a strange love-affair with her. Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, on the other hand, in a very similar way, gives a strange reality to a dim family tradition, and re-creates for herself, so to speak, a lover, dead more than two centuries before, who had been the victim of a mysterious tragedy. One cannot but admire the cleverness with which these fantasies are wrought out, and the beauty of the style in which the stories are told ; but they fail to touch us. The author laughs at the common ghost-story, the apparition of the "maiden aunt" who is seen to walk six months after her decease. But we venture to say that the simple tale told by Mrs. Moles- worth in one of her books, of the two old women who, compelled during their age to drag out a weary life in Continental cities, come back after death and haunt their old Irish home, is far more effective in a mere literary sense, quite apart from any question of its truth, than anything that the very clever pen of "Vernon Lee" has given us here. Perhaps the most successful of these fantasies is " Diontea." But it does not strike us as so effective as the work of Edgar Poe, of which it certainly reminds us.
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