The interest of the story centres, however, in Mr. Daylesford, who marries not for love but for ambition, and is rather severely punished for doing so.  Mrs. Daylesford has a sister called Polly who develops, according to the approved psychological method, from a hobbledehoy girl into a tender sweet woman.  Polly is delightfully drawn, but the most attractive character in the book, strangely enough, is Mr. Godfrey Daylesford.  He is very weak, but he is very charming.  So charming indeed is he, that it is only when one closes the book that one thinks of censuring him.  While we are in direct contact with him we are fascinated.  Such a character has at any rate the morality of truth about it.  Here literature has faithfully followed life.  Mrs. Hunt writes a very pleasing style, bright and free from affectation.  Indeed, everything in her work is clever except the title.

A Child of the Revolution is by the accomplished authoress of the Atelier du Lys.  The scene opens in France in 1793, and the plot is extremely ingenious.  The wife of Jacques Vaudes, a Lyons deputy, loses by illness her baby girl while her husband is absent in Paris where he has gone to see Danton.  At the instigation of an old priest she adopts a child of the same age, a little orphan of noble birth, whose parents have died in the Reign of Terror, and passes it off as her own.  Her husband, a stern and ardent Republican, worships the child with a passion like that of Jean Valjean for Cosette, nor is it till she has grown to perfect womanhood that he discovers that he has given his love to the daughter of his enemy.  This is a noble story, but the workmanship, though good of its kind, is hardly adequate to the idea.  The style lacks grace, movement and variety.  It is correct but monotonous.  Seriousness, like property, has its duties as well as its rights, and the first duty of a novel is to please.  A Child of the Revolution hardly does that.  Still it has merits.

Aphrodite is a romance of ancient Hellas.  The supposed date, as given in the first line of Miss Safford’s admirable translation, is 551 B.C.  This, however, is probably a misprint.  At least, we cannot believe that so careful an archaeologist as Ernst Eckstein would talk of a famous school of sculpture existing at Athens in the sixth century, and the whole character of the civilisation is of a much later date.  The book may be described as a new setting of the tale of Acontius and Cydippe, and though Eckstein is a sort of literary Tadema and cares more for his backgrounds than he does for his figures, still he can tell a story very well, and his hero is made of flesh and blood.  As regards the style, the Germans have not the same feeling as we have about technicalities in literature.  To our ears such words as ‘phoreion,’ ‘secos,’ ‘oionistes,’ ‘Thyrides’ and the like sound harshly in a novel and give an air of pedantry, not of picturesqueness.  Yet in its tone Aphrodite reminds us of the late Greek novels.  Indeed, it might be one of the lost tales of Miletus.  It deserves to have many readers and a better binding.