ty 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.

(1) Astray: A Tale of a Country Town