Novats.—Run to Ground. By Mrs. Robert Jocelyn. (Hutchin- son.)—The exposure,
by means of hypnotism, of a piece of villainy committed five years before, that is referred to by the title of Bun to Ground, furnishes a sensational, dramatic, and extremely improbable finale ; but we did not find the preceding chase particularly thrilling, which is perhaps owing to its not being sufficiently worked in as an integral part cf the story, or perhaps to the difficulty of feeling keenly interested in what was over and done with so long ago. If the heroine had a few faults, she would be such an eminently likeable young lady, that one is half- ashamed of wishing for the addition of a little proverbial rough- ness to relieve the insipidity of her course of true love. The instances of defective English to be met with in the book should perhaps be regarded as local colouring, inasmuch as nearly all the characters are in a chronic condition of considering hunting to be the be-all and end-all of existence, and amongst people of that sort a high standard of scholarship is possibly not to be expected.—A Perfect Fool. By Florence Warden. (F. V. White and Co.)—The resemblance between A Perfect Fool and "Beauty and the Beast," gives rise at an early stage to the idea that the disguised Prince of the fairy-tale is to be looked for in the person of the boorish master of the wonderful palace where Miss Beauty takes up her abode. Before long, however, this idea is disturbed by suspicions that the Prince's part may possibly be assigned to a still more unlikely individual—that is to say, a mysterious deaf and dumb lunatic kept in confinement by Mr. Beast—and finally the suspicions are justified by events, when the lunatic proves to have been either not afflicted at all as supposed, or else cured, and everything ends as it should do. Though the story is nonsense, it displays some ingenuity of construction ; and readers who do not object to a tissue of improbabilities may find the novel assist in beguiling time on a railway journey.— How He Became a Peer. By James Thirsk. (Ward and Downey ) —In this novel is depicted the process whereby a gutter-snipe of plebeian origin is transformed into a millionaire, Peer, and friend of royalty ; and the closing sentence, l'argent peat tout, which seems intended to account for the startling metamorphosis, can be accepted as a partial explanation only, because his ascent by the successive rungs of domestic service, grocery business, gambling on the Stock Exchange, and politics, to the summit of the ladder of his ambition, would certainly not have been accomplished if he had not been endowed by nature with an unusual amount of intelligence, force of will, and power of sticking to his purpose. One regrets to see these gifts, which, if rightly directed, might have produced a great man in the best sense of the term, wasted on such an utter cad and blackguard as Jem, who is absolutely devoid of conscience, honour, generosity, or goodness, and whose sole claim to regard is that though he repels, he does not bore. The book's satire and whole style is characterised rather by boldness than delicacy of touch ; and we trust that when next the author takes pen in hand, he will select a more attractive subject than Jem Walsh to write about, and devote somewhat less of his attention to the seamy side of human nature.—Ventured in Vain. By Reginald E. Salwey. (Hurst and Blackett.) — The hero of Ventured in Vain deserves a great deal of commiseration. It is really extremely hard on a good, right-minded young man to be made the unconscious usurper of somebody else's fortune, by his mother's unscrupulous act in suppressing a will with the aid of a wicked butler (who, by-the-by, insists on being bribed to silence by the curious method of receiving £100 notes pinned into the leaves of the grocer's monthly book)— because, of course, the butler will sooner or later inform the son a the transaction, and then the latter will inevitably be made wretched by a conflict between filial anxiety to shield his mother's reputation, and high-principled desire to restore the fortune to its proper owner. When, however, the aforesaid owner is a lady to whom he is engaged and devotedly attached, who heartily returns his affection, and is just as eager to become his wife after she knows of the crime as she was before, then marrying her is a natural common-sense way out of the difficulty that ought evi- dently to be adopted at once ; and as one sees no reason for Godfrey's delay in doing so, one gets out of patience with him, and is inclined to wonder whether a desire (on the author's part) to fill a certain number of pages can have any- thing to do with the needless prolongation of his woes.
Het ty's Heritage. By Noel Dene. (Hurst and Blackett.)—This novel consists of two volumes of harmless rubbish cemented together with a secret -which is, from the beginning, so open a one that no reader will be astonished at the end to behold the housekeeper's niece blossom out into a gentleman's daughter and great heiress. Though she is "as good as gold," and credited with "strict ideas of honour and honesty," yet, as it is not usually considered quite the thing to appropriate to oneself stray articles found in other people's drawers and cupboards, we must confess to being a little surprised to find her obtaining posses- sion of an important letter and tin-box in a manner that- leaves room for considerable doubt whether the stigma cast- upon her character may have been altogether unmerited, not- withstanding her innocence of that particular theft whereof she was accused. Why is one of the personages described as a " strange " mixture of cunning and deceit ? It is a combina- tion which seems to us to have no strangeness at all about it.— Rachel Dene. By Robert Buchanan. 2 vols. (Chatto and Windu.s.) —The reviewing of Mr. Robert Buchanan's novels has for a long time been very depressing work, and the reviewing of Rachel Dene is by no means an exhilarating duty. Those who remember Mr. Buchanan's early verse and some of his earliest prose cannot have any doubt that he is a man of genius ; but there is no genius— there is not even respectable literary skill—in his latest story. It is a mere melodramatic pot-boiler, clumsy in construction, improbable in incident, and utterly destitute of any of the qualities which belong to literature. Some of Mr. Buchanan's recent utterances seem to indicate his lack of respect for his fellow-men, but he might retain some shrel of respect for himself and his own really great gifts.
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