emetrius. Both of them are
murdered, and with the death of this strange hero Mr. Coleridge ends his
remarkable story.

On the whole, Mr. Coleridge has written a really good historical novel
and may be congratulated on his success. The style is particularly
interesting, and the narrative parts of the book are deserving of high
praise for their clearness, dignity and sobriety. The speeches and
passages of dialogue are not so fortunate, as they have an awkward
tendency to lapse into bad blank verse. Here, for instance, is a speech
printed by Mr. Coleridge as prose, in which the true music of prose is
sacrificed to a false metrical system which is at once monotonous and
tiresome:

But Death, who brings us freedom from all falsehood,
Who heals the heart when the physician fails,
Who comforts all whom life cannot console,
Who stretches out in sleep the tired watchers;
He takes the King and proves him but a beggar!
He speaks, and we, deaf to our Maker's voice,
Hear and obey the call of our destroyer!
Then let us murmur not at anything;
For if our ills are curable, 'tis idle,
And if they are past remedy, 'tis vain.
The worst our strongest enemy can do
Is take from us our life, and this indeed
Is in the power of the weakest also.

This is not good prose; it is merely blank verse of an inferior quality,
and we hope that Mr. Coleridge in his next novel will not ask us to
accept second-rate poetry as musical prose. For, that Mr. Coleridge is a
young writer of great ability and culture cannot be doubted and, indeed,
in spite of the error we have pointed out, Demetrius remains one of the
most fascinating and delightful novels that has appeared this season.

Demetrius. By the Hon. Stephen Coleridge. (Kegan Paul.)

NEW NOVELS

(Saturday Review, August 20, 1887.)

Teutonic fiction, as a rule, is somewhat heavy and very sentimental; but
Werner's Her Son, excellently translated by Miss Tyrrell, is really a
capital story and would make a capital play. Old Count Steinruck has two
grandsons, Raoul and Michael. The latter is brought up like a peasant's
child, cruelly treated by his grandfather and by the peasant to whose
care he is confided, his mother, the Countess Louis Steinruck, having
married an adventurer and a gambler. He is the rough hero of the tale,
the Saint Michael of that war with evil which is life; while Raoul,
spoiled by his grandfather and his French mother,