Shorter Notices
Tins omnibus volume is the latest in the series which began with Novels of Mystery from the Victorian Age, and one of the most entertaining. Mr. Powell has done us a service in exhuming Guy Livingstone. G. A. Lawrence wrote about mid-century, and this book comes between the other two in this omnibus. He has many of the faults of the minor novelists of his period, and his people are so far removed from the present day that one cannot help wondering whether such people ever really existed, but in spite of that he is very readable. The same may be said of Ouida's Moths, the latest of the trio in time. A period piece this if ever there was one, with the naughty Lady Dolly disporting herself at Trouville in a "legless and armless" bathing-costume of "tight-drawn rainbow coloured stripes," which brings a blush to the damask cheeks of her pure young daughter. An unforgettable picture. Mr. Powell has chosen to begin his omnibus with Henrietta Temple, one of Disraeli's earlier works. This is a delightful non-political love story. It is much better written and dates far less, than the other two novels in the volume, and, as the editor says, it really belongs to the eighteenth century in• spirit . . . one keeps on getting an echo of Jane Austen as one reads. It is a curious comment on -present-day economics that these 890 pages of small—much too small—type are printed in Holland, whilst in the land of his birth a Shakespeare is not readily come by. What, one wonders, would the Earl of Beacons-. field have said about that?
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