28 JANUARY 1893, Page 12

A Lost Soul. By W. L. Alden. (Chatto and Windus.)—A

man who lives a selfish, scientific life—a mere automaton, he calls himself—wakes up to the fact that he has a soul and can sin. The cause of this is a woman found frozen in a glacier—a woman three hundred years old—whom he resuscitates. The rest of the story, and how out of jealousy he murders her, persuading him- self that she has in truth lost her soul, the author tells in a manner not devoid of power. The character of the soulless woman, a Venetian, is typical of the sixteenth-century non-moral Italian nobility. Goring, the Englishman, is a modern man equally soulless,—a trifle too overdrawn, in fact. The story is short, and the characters good, and the idea of the motive well worked out, and the whole makes a good half-hour's reading.