A Daughter of Fife tells us of the love of a young artist for a Scotch fisher-girl.  The character sketches are exceptionally good, especially that of David Promoter, a fisherman who leaves his nets to preach the gospel, and the heroine is quite charming till she becomes civilised.  The book is a most artistic combination of romantic feeling with realistic form, and it is pleasant to read descriptions of Scotch scenery that do not represent the land of mist and mountain as a sort of chromolithograph from the Brompton Road.

In Mr. Speight’s novel, A Barren Title, we have an impoverished earl who receives an allowance from his relations on condition of his remaining single, being all the time secretly married and the father of a grown-up son.  The story is improbable and amusing.

On the whole, there is a great deal to be said for our ordinary English novelists.  They have all some story to tell, and most of them tell it in an interesting manner.  Where they fail is in concentration of style.  Their characters are far too eloquent and talk themselves to tatters.  What we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric.  We are most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they would talk less and think more.  They lead us through a barren desert of verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature.  However, one should not be too severe on English novels:  they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

(1) The Wolfe of Badenoch:  A Historical Romance of the Fourteenth Century.  By Sir Thomas Lauder. (Hamilton, Adams and Co.)

(2) Keep My Secret.  By G. M. Robins. (Bentley and Son.)

(3) Mrs. Dorriman.  By the Hon. Mrs. Henry Chetwynd. (Chapman and Hall.)

(4) Delamere.  By G. Curzon. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

(5) A Daughter of Fife.  By Amelia Barr. (James Clarke and Co.)

(6) A Barren Title.  By T. W. Speight. (Chatto and Windus.)

BALZAC IN ENGLISH

(Pall Mall Gazette, September 13, 1886.)

Many years ago, in a number of All the Year Round, Charles Dickens complained that Balzac was very little read in England, and although since then the public has become more familiar with the great masterpieces of French fiction, still it may be doubted whether the Comedie Humaine is at all appreciated or understood by the general run of novel readers.  It is really the greatest monument that literature has produced in our century, and M. Taine hardly exaggerates when he says that, after Shakespeare, Balzac is our most important magazine of documents on human nature.  Balzac’s aim, in fact, was to do for humanity what Buffon had done for the animal creation.  As the naturalist studied lions and tigers, so the