In the Choir of Westminster Abbey. By Emma Marshall. (Seeley
and Co.)—This is a story of the days of Henry Purcell, whose eager and intense face, as Sir Godfrey Kneller pictured it, fur- nishes the frontispiece. Mrs. Marshall has worked up the acces- sories and surroundings with care, and has produced a pleasant story. The first half is better, we are inclined to think, than the second. We lose our interest in a story in which there is nothing particular to expect. Mrs. Marshall seems to have taken up with a mild Jacobitism. The husband of her heroine becomes a non- juror ; of this, perhaps, we ought not to complain, for he followed excellent examples. We may take it, too, as dramatic when the heroine speaks of Queen Mary as "hardening her heart against her own father." Jacobites, of course, talked in that way, thcragh
the Queen really acted as a true patriot. King James had made himself quite impossible. But the English people, as usual, would have a compromise, and she lent herself to it. If she and her sister had refused the succession, there must have been a formidable civil war.
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