among the elegancies of the habitual hero like a shaggy dog in a drawing-room; and though the author admires him to the core of his heart, he never once hesitates to put him in ridiculous plight, and sets at last this diamond-in-the-rough in his purest and most polished gold.  It is a delightful book, with one scene in it, the memorable night at sea, worth scores of customary novels, and, apart from the noble and beautiful delineation of David Dodd, would be invaluable for nothing else but its faultless portraiture of that millinery devotee, Mrs. Bazalgette.

From two such natures as David and his wife nothing less noble should spring; and therefore, through necessity, their daughter Julia, the heroine of “Very Hard Cash,” is that ideal of vehemence and sweetness which we find her, not by any choice or fancy of the writer, but on account of fate, natural deduction, and a priori logic.  She is, however, for all that, to some extent a creation; one may imagine her, long for her, look for her,—­one will not immediately find her.  Youth never was painted so well as here; both Julia and Alfred are aureoled in its beauty; they are not reasonable mortals with the accumulated perfections of three-score and ten, but young creatures just brimmed, as young creatures are, with the blissfulness of being.  Nobody ever appreciated youth as this writer does, nobody has so entered into it; he never fails, to be sure, to make you laugh at it a little, but all the time he confesses a kind of loving worship of that buoyant time when the effervescence of the animal spirits fills the brain with its happy fumes, of that fearless, confident period that

  “Is not, like Atlas, curled
  Stooping ’neath the gray old world,
  But which takes it, lithe and bland,
  Easily in its small hand.”

We have often wondered that no one ever before grappled with the material of this last volume.  The easy ability of one person to incarcerate another in a mad-house is as often abused in America as in England, and circumstances in this drama which might strike a casual reader as preposterous we can match with kindred and more hopeless cases within our own knowledge.  Perhaps one of the ablest portions of the treatment which this book affords the theme is in the singular collocation of characters,—­the hero being wrongfully imprisoned as insane, the heroine’s father really made so by medical malpractice, the hero’s sister dying of injuries received from another maniac, his uncle being imbecile, and his father and one of his physicians becoming monomaniac.  Nicer shades than these allow could not be drawn, and the subject stands in bold relief as a monument of dauntless courage and enthusiasm.