erybody else; but it is pretty nearly that.
Everybody is in love with some one else; and the consequence is, after a
good deal of cross-purposing and some suffering, half a dozen marriages.
The change that has taken place in the purpose of the novel and in the
manner of treatment of character by the novel writer could not be more
clearly exampled than by "Love in Idleness." It is absolutely without
plot, has hardly enough coherence to be called a story, is entirely
without incident. And yet it is very interesting from the first page to
the last, although its interest is not of the highest kind even in the
novel range. To give our readers any notion of it is quite impossible
without telling them almost all that happens, all that is said, thought,
and felt by the various personages. The book is strongly American; but
its Americans are of the most cultivated classes; and it is guiltless of
hard-fisted farmers, Southern slave-drivers, and California
gold-diggers. It is entirely free from that irritating intellectual
eruption sometimes called American humor. In fact, its personages are
taken both from the Old England and the New; and side by side, one set
can hardly be distinguished from the other as in real life. He who must
perforce be called the hero is a Senator, forty-eight years old, who is
engaged to marry a rather cool, reserved, and stately woman of thirty,
but is loved almost at first sight by Felise Clairmont, a girl of
nineteen, half French, half American, of enchanting beauty, and still
more captivating ways. She is loved by almost every other man in the
book; but her avowed lover is the Senator's younger brother, who is the
host of the assembled company, exclusive of Felise, who lives near by
with her guardian, a certain judge. The Senator loves the young girl as
fondly as she loves him, and still more deeply, and what the result is
we shall leave our readers to find out from the book itself, which will
richly repay the novel reader. It is exceedingly well written, and its
social machinery is managed with skill; but it is a little too much
elaborated in the conversations, which are rather excessively
epigrammatic at times. The author of such a novel, if not an old hand,
should give us something better and stronger ere long.

[4] "_Love in Idleness._ A Summer Story." By ELLEN W. OLNEY. 8vo
(paper), pp. 131. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

--"The Man Who Was Not a Colonel"[5] is an amusing story