The Devil, in so far as I have met him in fiction, has usually been a highly successful intriguer on behalf of anyone prepared to make the necessary bargain.  Sir RONALD ROSS, however, to judge from the rather confused mediaeval happenings in the Alps which are faithfully described in The Revels of Orsera (MURRAY), has rather a low opinion of the intelligence of Mephistopheles.  Anyhow, a certain Zozimo, deformed in body but of great romantic sensibility, appears to have exchanged his outward presence for that of a rich and handsome young Count, and in this guise wooed the Lady Lelita, for whose sake her father had devised a magnificent contest of suitors at Andermatt in the year 1495.  After a great deal of preliminary bungling the supposititious Count, with the Devil in Zozimo’s shape as his body-servant, was just about to secure the object of his affections when Zozimo was stabbed by his mother, with the result that the double identity was fused and the Lady Lelita was left with a dying dwarf as her knight.  If the plot of The Revels of Orsera is a little unsatisfying the elaboration of scenic description and mediaeval pageantry is conscientious in the extreme, and the laughter which followed the malicious pranks of Gangogo, the professional jester of the tourney, must, if I am to take the author’s word for it, have made the glaciers ring.  There is a great deal in the way of philosophy and psychology that is very baffling in this book, but of one thing I feel certain, and that is that the Elemental Spirits of the Heights, to whom frequent allusion is made, must find the winter sports of a later age a sorry substitute for the rare old frolics of the fifteenth century.

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It can at least be claimed for Mrs. MARGARET BAILLIE SAUNDERS that she has provided an original setting and “chorus” for her new novel, Becky & Co.  (HUTCHINSON).  Tales of City courtship have been written often enough, but the combination here of a millinery establishment and a community of Little Sisters of St. Francis under one roof in the Minories, gives a stimulating atmosphere to a story otherwise not specially distinguished. Becky was, as perhaps you may have guessed, head of the millinery business, next door to which was housed the firm of Ray, St. Cloud & Stiggany, leather-dressers, the three partners in which all presently become suitors for the hand of Becky. This in effect is the story—­under which thimble will the heart of the heroine be eventually found?—­a problem that, in view of the obviously superior claims of young St. Cloud over his two elderly rivals, will not leave you long guessing.  An element of novel complication is however furnished by the device of making St. Cloud at first engaged to Ray’s daughter, who, subsequently retiring into the Franciscan sisterhood, left her fiance free to become the rival of her widowed father. (As the late DAN LENO used to observe, this is a little intricate!) For the rest, as I have said, an agreeable, very feminine story of mingled sentiment, commerce and ecclesiastical interest, the last predominating.