“The Cloister and the Hearth,” in spite of its faults, is really a great book.  It is a positive contribution to history as well as to romance.  It would be vain to point to any other volume which could convey to common minds so clear and accurate a conception of European life in the fifteenth century as this.  The author has deeply studied the annals, memoirs, and histories which record the peculiarities of that life, and he has carried into the study a knowledge of those powers and passions of human nature which are the same in every age.  The result is a “romance of history” which contains more essential truth than the most labored histories; for the writer is a man who has both the heart to feel and the imagination to conceive the realities of the time about which he writes.

The characterization of the book is original, various, and powerful.  It ranges from the lowest hind to the most exquisite representative of female tenderness and purity.  The scenes of passion show a clear conception of and a strong hold upon the emotional elements of character, and a capacity to exhibit their most terrible workings in language which seems identical with the feelings it so burningly expresses.  In vigor and vividness of description and narration the novel excels any of Reade’s previous books.  The plot is about the same as that of “The Good Fight,” though the denouement is different.  “The Cloister and the Hearth,” indeed, incorporates “The Good Fight” in its pages, but the latter forms not more than a fourth of the extended work.  Altogether the romance must be classed among the best which have appeared during the last twenty years.

Lessons in Life.  A Series of Familiar Essays.  By TIMOTHY TITCOMB.  New York:  Charles Scribner, 16 mo.

Who is more popular than honest Timothy?  Opening this, his latest volume, we read on, a fly-leaf fronting the title-page that twenty-six editions of the “Letters to Young People,” fifteen editions each of “Bitter-Sweet” and “Gold Foil,” and thirteen editions of “Miss Gilbert’s Career” have gone the way of all good books.  The author says, in his modest preface to the “Lessons,” that he can hardly pretend to have done more than to organize and put into form the average thinking of those who read his books, and be only claims for his essays that they possess the quality of common sense.  He herein pays a very high compliment to the crowd which demands over the bookseller’s counter so many thousands of his volumes.  Wisdom, admirably put, is not a commodity glutting the market every day.  We find in the pages of this new venture so many healthy maxims and so much excellent advice, that we hope the volume will spread itself farther and wider than any of its predecessors.  This wish fulfilled will give it no mean circulation.  “The Ways of Charity,” one of the papers in this volume, ought to be printed in tract form, and scattered broadcast everywhere.  And there are other articles in the book quite as good as this.