(1) Stories of Wicklow.  By George Francis Armstrong, M.A. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(2) Somnia Medici.  By John A. Goodchild.  Second Series. (Kegan Paul.)

(3) Verses:  Translated and Original.  By H. E. Keene. (W.  H. Allen and Co.)

(4) Procris and Other Poems.  By W. G. Hole. (Kegan Paul.)

SOME NOVELS

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1886.)

After a careful perusal of ’Twixt Love and Duty, by Mr. Tighe Hopkins, we confess ourselves unable to inform anxious inquirers who it is that is thus sandwiched, and how he (or she) got into so unpleasant a predicament.  The curious reader with a taste for enigmas may be advised to find out for himself—­if he can.  Even if he be unsuccessful, his trouble will be repaid by the pleasant writing and clever character drawing of Mr. Hopkins’s tale.  The plot is less praiseworthy.  The whole Madeira episode seems to lead up to this dilemma, and after all it comes to nothing.  We brace up our nerves for a tragedy and are treated instead to the mildest of marivaudage—­which is disappointing.  In conclusion, one word of advice to Mr. Hopkins:  let him refrain from apostrophising his characters after this fashion:  ’Oh, Gilbert Reade, what are you about that you dally with this golden chance?’ and so forth.  This is one of the worst mannerisms of a bygone generation of story tellers.

Mr. Gallenga has written, as he says, ‘a tale without a murder,’ but having put a pistol-ball through his hero’s chest and left him alive and hearty notwithstanding, he cannot be said to have produced a tale without a miracle.  His heroine, too, if we may judge by his descriptions of her, is ‘all a wonder and a wild desire.’  At the age of seventeen she ’was one of the Great Maker’s masterpieces . . . a living likeness of the Dresden Madonna.’  One rather shudders to think of what she may become at forty, but this is an impertinent prying into futurity.  She hails from ‘Maryland, my Maryland!’ and has ’received a careful, if not a superior, education.’  Need we add that she marries the heir to an earldom who, as aforesaid, has had himself perforated by a pistol-bullet on her behalf?  Mr. Gallenga’s division of this book into acts and scenes is not justified by anything specially dramatic either in its structure or its method.  The dialogue, in truth, is somewhat stilted.  Nevertheless, its first-hand sketches of Roman society are not without interest, and one or two characters seem to be drawn from nature.

The Life’s Mistake which forms the theme of Mrs. Lovett Cameron’s two volumes is not a mistake after all, but results in unmixed felicity; and as it is brought about by fraud on the part of the hero, this conclusion is not as moral as it might be.  For the rest, the tale is a very familiar one.  Its personages are the embarrassed squire with his charming daughter, the wealthy and amorous mortgagee, and the sailor lover who is either supposed to be drowned or falsely represented to be fickle—­in Mrs. Cameron’s tale he is both in succession.  When we add that there is a stanza from Byron on the title-page and a poetical quotation at the beginning of each chapter, we have possessed the discerning reader of all necessary information both as to the matter and the manner of Mrs. Cameron’s performance.