As for A Marked Man, That Winter Night, and Driven Home, the first shows some power of description and treatment, but is sadly incomplete; the second is quite unworthy of any man of letters, and the third is absolutely silly.  We sincerely hope that a few more novels like these will be published, as the public will then find out that a bad book is very dear at a shilling.

(1) Injury and Insult.  By Fedor Dostoieffski.  Translated from the Russian by Frederick Whishaw. (Vizetelly and Co.)

(2) The Willow Garth.  By W. M. Hardinge. (Bentley and Son.)

(3) Marcella Grace.  By Rosa Mulholland. (Macmillan and Co.)

(4) Soap.  By Constance MacEwen. (Arrowsmith.)

(5) A Marked Man.  By Faucet Streets. (Hamilton and Adams.)

(6) That Winter Night.  By Robert Buchanan. (Arrowsmith.)

(7) Driven Home.  By Evelyn Owen. (Arrowsmith.)

SOME NOVELS

(Saturday Review, May 7, 1887.)

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history.  In novels they are detestable, and Miss Bayle’s Romance is entirely spoiled as a realistic presentation of life by the author’s attempt to introduce into her story a whole mob of modern celebrities and notorieties, including the Heir Apparent and Mr. Edmund Yates.  The identity of the latter personage is delicately veiled under the pseudonym of ‘Mr. Atlas, editor of the World,’ but the former appears as ‘The Prince of Wales’ pur et simple, and is represented as spending his time yachting in the Channel and junketing at Homburg with a second-rate American family who, by the way, always address him as ‘Prince,’ and show in other respects an ignorance that even their ignorance cannot excuse.  Indeed, His Royal Highness is no mere spectator of the story; he is one of the chief actors in it, and it is through his influence that the noisy Chicago belle, whose lack of romance gives the book its title, achieves her chief social success.  As for the conversation with which the Prince is credited, it is of the most amazing kind.  We find him on one page gravely discussing the depression of trade with Mr. Ezra P. Bayle, a shoddy American millionaire, who promptly replies, ’Depression of fiddle-sticks, Prince’; in another passage he naively inquires of the same shrewd speculator whether the thunderstorms and prairie fires of the West are still ‘on so grand a scale’ as when he visited Illinois; and we are told in the second volume that, after contemplating the magnificent view from St. Ives he exclaimed with enthusiasm, ’Surely Mr. Brett must have had a scene like this in his eye when he painted Britannia’s Realm?  I never saw anything more beautiful.’  Even Her Majesty figures in this extraordinary story in spite of the excellent aphorism ne touchez pas a la reine; and when Miss Alma J. Bayle is married to the Duke of Windsor’s second son she receives from the