lant; a jealous baronet's daughter, and a witch; a powder explosion, which kills the heroine for a year, after which she comes to life, insane, and hidden in a cave; she recovers her wits, and marries her buccaneer. Of a better sort is The Old Factory,' a story of a Lancashire manufacturer in the first half of the century. Nominally, it is the story of his son's love affairs; but the only part that amounts to anything is that which traces the fortunes of the father from a laborer to a rich manufacturer, able to look forward to "founding a family." We should judge there was real knowledge of, and sympathy with, English lower middle class dissenting life here; and it is interesting to see some common traits come out between this and American life, that are not seen in other phases of English society. Struck Downs is a detective story, and a very ordinary one indeed. It has a frank and direct way of telling the story; but so inefficient is the attempt at a detective plot, that after a not very complex web of evidence has been woven about the wrong person (the reader being all the time privately assured by the author's obvious sympathy that this is the wrong person), a tame bit of testimony turns suspicion directly to the right one, and then the author, apparently satisfied to have extricated his favorite, hastily winds up by saying that "a good deal of slight confirmatory evidence" was got together, and "two days' impartial investigation resulted in overwhelming evidence against the prisoner," and he was convicted and sentenced to the extreme penalty of the law.

More noticeable is the latest story by Florence Warden, A Vagrant Wife. This is by no means a novel to be praised, but, on the contrary, one to be censured in every respect. It is impossible in plot, absolutely without high motive, either moral or artistic, full of melodramatic absurdities; but it has ability 1 The Old Factory. A Lancashire Story. By William Westall. London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell & Co. 1885.

2 Struck Down. By Hawley Smart. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by James T. White.

A Vagrant Wife. By Florence Warden. New York:

behind it. Nothing could bring out more strikingly the difference we have noted between the English and the American attitude toward novel-writing as a serious art, than the fate of this young woman's work, compared to that of several young American women who have made a hit with a first novel

Miss Howard, or Miss Woolson, or Miss Litchfield. What serious acceptance of the work as a lofty one, on the one side; what honest study of the art; what improvement, and attainment of a dignified place—whether great or small, still dignified—in the literary world: on the other side, what an evident conception of a novel merely as a thing to sell; and what a steady deterioration, book after book. One is almost disposed to think that a difference must exist between the two countries in the class of society-always excepting a few names—that does the novel-writing; that it must be an occupation regarded there with some social disesteem, and so rarely thought of by the men and women of most ability-while here it is well known what a source of social prestige a successful novel is; great physicans and admirals long for the novelist's laurels; and inconceivable as it is that Matthew Arnold should undertake a novel, we have seen our poet Longfellow and our essayist Holmes both attracted to that form of literature. There are degrading conditions attached to English novel-writing (for new authors, at all events) in that favorable notices have to be solicited. This is likely to repel the best men from the field. Anthony Trollope records that he never bent to the custom, but his independence cost him years of waiting for success. Miss Warden dates her success-in being read and making money-from a favorable notice obtained by solicitation. This was enough to destroy all high ideas of her art from the first. Had she had and kept such, it seems certain that she might have accomplished much. Even this worthless story, A Vagrant Wife, has excellent writing in it: she does not stumble in her sense of humor; the talk is almost always clever and natural, the figures

James T. White.

aims at.

Mr. James Payn is a novelist who is respected among his own people, and has good rank with English critics. He writes intelligently, and probably knows his London. But he has doubtless been too prolific, and his last book, The Luck of the Darrells,1 shows very faint gleams of ability, and many signs of weakness. It is ineffective, and does not seem worth the telling. The heroine is a pretty creature, and lovable, and that is about the best one can say for the story. We are surprised to note that a young lady of education and refinement says, without jest or quotation, that a sick girl "seems quite peart today." Mr. Payn probably knows whereof he speaks, but it is unexpected to find the word in England, and in good standing.

The repellant title of Houp-La' proves to belong to no rowdy tale, but to a touching little story, told with a straight-forward earnestness that makes it seem more like an ingenious narration of real events than like fiction. If one looks at it coolly, it is a trifle sentimental (not in a lover's way, for it is not a love-story), but so is many another touching thing. It is not in the manner of the day, but has an old-fashioned air. In one chapter, the soldiers sit telling each other stories, and we have never seen anything of the sort better done in a modest way, or more worthy of a quiet laugh; while the soft-hearted reader is very likely to cry over other chapters.

A bridge which spans perfectly the gap between the English and American novels of our present collection is J. Esten Cooke's The Maurice Mystery. It is curious how often whatever folly is in a man will come out when he undertakes to write a novel. Novelwriting is popularly supposed to be the easiest form of literary effort; but we are disposed to think it the one which requires the severest special training. It is certainly the one in which any defect of taste appears most glaringly; and this is natural, for novels are

1 The Luck of the Darrells. By James Payn.

York: Harper & Brothers. 1885.

New

behavior and human relations, and something of the extreme difficulty we find in regulating these properly in life must assail us when we try to do the same thing on paper. More than once, lately, men of high repute in their own calling have attempted novel-writing, and-to be frank-made fools of themselves. Now comes a scholar and historian of no mean rank (and, moreover, one who achieved a very pretty little historical novel, "My Lady Pokahontas,” a few months since), who in his new book has not come out as much above folly as could be wished. It is a semi-detective story, and the detective part of it is not ill-managed; the complications are unwound well, and the final solution sprung upon the reader with due unexpectedness. But the love-making, the conversation, much of the character drawing, are of the weakest; they are ruined by an attempt at jocose sprightliness, of a sort which in any but a Southern novel would indicate inferior social training. But whatever the reason may be, defective humor is not uncommon in old school Southern writing; it is not "broad," but it is silly. Yet the story has spirit and movement, and that is much.

Another old-fashioned story, obviously not the work of a professional novelist, is a home-production, and as such calls for kindly criticism-for we are disposed to think that in a region where the literary impulse is rare, every respectable effort toward literature is a good omen, rather than that a good native literature can only be created by sternly rebuking all but the best. Endura is a story of three generations of a New England family, who, beginning in the first as poor and rugged pioneers, prospered, and in the third found themselves heirs to an enormous foreign estate; as it is a French one, the wet blanket of Minister Phelps's recent manifesto to American heirs" is escaped. The story is very naïve and sincere, and (one or two points excepted) excites rather friendly feeling in the critic by its spirit. It rambles on with little reference to its plot, and an evident determination to put in about all the author remembers of New

4 Endura: or, Three Generations. By B. P. Moore. San Francisco: Golden Era Publishing Co. 1885.

ulently capture the government, and convert it from a democracy to a dictatorship, in the interest of virtue and purity, which are lost under the present system; and this scheme, on the eve of success, is thwarted by the seduction of his high-bred and accomplished daughter, out of revenge, by a coarse, unattractive subordinate, whom he had offended. The story comes down about the reader's ears in a crash of suicide, despair, and destruction, from which the couple whose love affairs have been wound up in the course of events emerge free and happy. There is neither serious politics nor serious art about it all.

From Mr. Hawthorne's prententious undertakings and weak completions, we turn with real relief to Nora Perry's modest and charming little story, For a Woman. It is among novels what her verses are among poetry. It is fresh, healthy, and refined; has plenty of feeling, yet nothing dramatic; and is, we think, correct and wise in its reading of life and love. Its very completeness within its own degree excludes much comment. It is not one of the books that "every one should read"; but it is one that a great many people should, and we refer our readers to the story itself for farther knowledge of it. Two collections of short stories, Color Studies, and A Lone Star Bopeep3 contain much that is good. Color Studies consists of the four stories which the author contrib. uted to the "Century." Their trick consists in the use of names of colors for the characters, as "Rose Madder," "Vandyke Brown"; which, as they are all about artists and are located in studios, and full of their shop talk, is a neat one, and proved taking. Of the four, "Jaune d'Antimoine" is the only one that has, apart from these ingenuities, much merit, but it is good enough to carry the rest. They are all written with a playful manner that is occasionally overdone, 1 For a Woman. By Nora Perry. Boston: Ticknor

& Co. 1885.

2 Color Studies. By Thomas A. Janvier. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by A. L. Bancroft & Co.

A Lone Star Bopeep, and Other Tales of Texas Ranch Life. By Howard Seely. New York: W. L. Mershon & Co. 1885.

but for the most part not unpleasant. The stories of the other collection are of Texas ranch-life. The imitation of the Harte school is obvious, but not altogether successful. Harte's finer qualities of manner are not caught, while a certain burlesque tone, which he himself imitated from Dickens, is exaggerated. Thus: "I may remark parenthetically at this point that the gentlemanly proprietor of the Eden Saloon, as aggregating in his collective individuality the functions of hotel-proprietor, bar-keeper, and gambler, typified in the mind of Penelope the serpent of Biblical story, with the general outlines of whose disreputable advice to confiding womanhood and subsequent depressing influence upon mankind in general, she was mistily familiar." Now, this sort of thing is false style, whether Dickens, or Harte, or a young disciple writes it. It is bad because it is cumbrous and hard to read, and worse because it is artificial; and that it is more or less clever does not altogether excuse it the author should manage to keep the cleverness and avoid the cumbrousness and artificiality. Like the sample, the stories are clever and somewhat artificial; they are vigorous and picturesque, jocose in their prevailing tone, and pressed down and overrunning with local color, much of which seems excellently caught. They do not always keep on the safe side of the line in their jocose treatment of the rowdy element. "A Wandering Melibaeus" is beyond comparison the best of them as a study, and the most sincere.

Of all the uncomfortable stories of the season, the palm lies with As it was Written.* It is a very well-written thing, but ghastly and repulsive in plot. Any one who does not mind this, will find it quite worth his while to read it. It is said to resemble "Called Back," and perhaps it does in manner, but the melodrama of "Called Back" is child's play to the gloomy effort of As it was Written after the utmost tragedy conceivable. Not that the story is of a noisy sort; it is very quiet. It claims to be a story of the 4 As it Was Written. A Jewish Musician's Story. By Sidney Luska. New York: Cassell & Co. For sale in San Francisco by A. L. Bancroft & Co.

Jewish quarter of New York, and interesting as a study of Jewish life; but there is no study of manners or life about it. The motive is supernatural, and the Jewish element merely incidental. Scarcely less unpleasant than As it was Written, and even better told, is A Wheel of Fire. This is by an author already more or less known. Its subject is hereditary insanity, and the worrying into madness of a lovely girl by the very fear of it, intensified by the question whether she might or might not marry, her lover and her love and her scruples and the conflicting advice of doctors tearing her to and fro in an agony of doubt which it is harrowing to read of. The gradual steps by which the beautiful young creature was fairly forced into the doom which she might have escaped are only too well told; and so real is Damaris made, and so lovely, that the reader perforce follows her story with painful interest, and cannot reconcile himself to the final catastrophe. The surroundings — an ancestral home of the bluest blood in New England, with all its picturesque accompanimentsare well drawn, and the sombreness is a little relieved by a subordinate pair of lovers who come out all right. There are some unusually well-said things in it. For instance: "This power of human nature to suffer has so stamped itself upon the consciousness of mankind, it has so deeply penetrated the very inmost soul of the race, that there is scarcely a mythology which does not insist upon the incarnation of deity in the flesh, as the only means by which even omniscience could obtain a just appreciation of the intolerable anguish of human existence." Good, too, is the mention of "a Wainwright of the last century, who had broken his neck while fox-hunting on the estates of an English cousin, a method of leaving this world which had commended itself to his contemporaries as so eminently respectable, that his memory still preserved in the family the aroma of clever achievement."

Still other two uncomfortable stories are

1 A Wheel of Fire. By Arlo Bates. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co.

Andromeda1 and Criss-Cross. They are not nearly so bad as the two just noticed, however, involving no madness nor despair, but only heart-breaks. In Andromeda, the Italian hero, who is the most noble of men, and has all his life had his own happiness postponed to that of others, and bestowed much affection and received little, finds personal happiness at last come to him in the form of an English sweetheart, whom he soon has to renounce, finding that her heart has strayed to his nearest friend. The story is well told, but not so well as to make the heart-break very painful to the reader. CrissCross, though less mature, is more effective. It is instructive to note that this is Miss Litchfield's third book only, since she made a hit, in a small way, with a first one, some two years since; while in a considerably less time since her hit with "The House on the Marsh," Florence Warden has run her books up to five. Miss Litchfield's writing, we think, improves; and the genuine study which she puts into it is evident. Criss-Cross is a study of a flirt—a subject to which the author has before given attention, and with very fair success; but this time she has done it with more than fair success. We doubt if there is anywhere as delicate, penetrating, and complete a study of the genus flirt. Miss Litchfield has caught admirably the lovableness which makes this class of women so dangerous; the baffling union of sweetness with the coolest selfishness; the temporary reality in them of the feelings which a shallower observer would say they pretend; the puzzling genuineness of their falsehoods. Mr. Black made a very good study of the type in "Shandon Bells," and it is testimony to the accuracy of both studies that they coincide in so many traits, too subtle for imitation to be possible. But "Freddie" is a more typical specimen than "Kitty." It is the more to Miss Litchfield's credit that she should draw her so justly

2 Andromeda, By George Fleming. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co.

3 Criss-Cross. By Grace Denio Litchfield. New York & London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach.