then feels for him that affection which she did not feel even in those moments when he recklessly risked his life to save hers.  In regard to characterization, Meredith, the hero, is throughout a mere name, without personality; but the authoress has succeeded in transforming Havilah from an abstract proposition into an individual existence.  Her Bedouin lover, the wild, fierce, passionate Arab boy, Abdoul, with his vehement wrath and no less vehement love, passing from a frustrated design to assassinate Meredith, whom he considered the accepted lover of Havilah, to an abject prostration of his whole being, corporeal and mental, at the feet of his mistress, saluting them with “a devouring storm of kisses,” is by far the most intense and successful effort at characterization in the whole volume.  The conclusion of the story, which results in the acceptance by Meredith of the conditions enforced by the celestial purity of the heroine, will be far less satisfactory to the majority of readers than if Havilah had been represented as possessed of sufficient spiritual power to convert her passionate Arab lover into a being fit to be a Christian husband.  By all the accredited rules of the logic of passion, Abdoul deserved her, rather than Meredith.  Leaving, however, all those considerations which relate to the management of the story as connected with the impulses of the characters, great praise cannot be denied to the authoress for her conception and development of the character of Havilah.  Virgin innocence has rarely been more happily combined with intellectual culture, and the reader follows the course of her thoughts—­and so vital are her thoughts that they cause all the real events of the story—­with a tranquil delight in her beautiful simplicity and intelligent affectionateness, compared with which the pleasure derived from the ordinary stimulants of romance is poor and tame.  At least two-thirds of the volume are devoted to descriptions of Eastern scenery, habits, customs, manners, and men, and these are generally excellent.  Altogether, the book will add to the reputation of the authoress.

* * * * *

Life and Times of General Sam.  Dale, the Mississippi Partisan.  By J.F.H.  CLAIBORNE.  Illustrated by John M’Lenan.  New York:  Harper & Brothers.

The adventures of General Dale, Mr. Claiborne tells us, were taken from his own lips by the author and two friends, and from the notes of all three a memoir was compiled, but the MSS. were lost in the Mississippi.  We regret that Dale’s own words were thus lost; for the stories of the hardy partisan are not improved by his biographer’s well-meant efforts to tell them in more graceful language.  Mr. Claiborne’s cheap eloquence is perhaps suited to the unfastidious taste of a lower latitude; but we prefer those stories, too few in number, in which the homely words of Dale are preserved.