Unfortunately, however, the murdered man,
with that superhuman strength which on the stage and in novels always
accompanies the agony of death, had managed in falling from the dog-cart
to throw the marriage certificate up a fir tree! There it is found by a
worthy farmer who talks that conventional rustic dialect which, though
unknown in the provinces, is such a popular element in every Adelphi
melodrama; and it ultimately falls into the hands of an unscrupulous
young man who succeeds in blackmailing Mr. Bourchier and in marrying his
daughter. Mr. Bourchier suffers tortures from excess of chloral and of
remorse; and there is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind, that kind
which Mr. Conway may justly be said to have invented and the result of
which is not to be underrated. For, if to raise a goose skin on the
reader be the aim of art, Mr. Conway must be regarded as a real artist.
So harrowing is his psychology that the ordinary methods of punctuation
are quite inadequate to convey it. Agony and asterisks follow each other
on every page and, as the murderer's conscience sinks deeper into chaos,
the chaos of commas increases.

Finally, Mr. Bourchier dies, splendide mendax to the end. A confession,
he rightly argued, would break up the harmony of the family circle,
particularly as his eldest son had married the daughter of his luckless
victim. Few criminals are so thoughtful for others as Mr. Bourchier is,
and we are not without admiration for the unselfishness of one who can
give up the luxury of a death-bed repentance.

A Cardinal Sin, then, on the whole, may be regarded as a crude novel of a
common melodramatic type. What is painful about it is its style, which
is slipshod and careless. To describe a honeymoon as a _rare occurrence
in any one person's life_ is rather amusing. There is an American story
of a young couple who had to be married by telephone, as the bridegroom
lived in Nebraska and the bride in New York, and they had to go on
separate honeymoons; though, perhaps, this is not what Mr. Conway meant.
But what can be said for a sentence like this?--'The established
favourites in the musical world are never quite sure but the _new comer_
may not be _one among the many they have seen fail_'; or this?--'As it is
the fate of such a very small number of men to marry a prima donna, I
shall be doing little harm, _or be likely to change plans of life_, by
enumerating some of the disadvantages.' The nineteenth century may be a
prosaic age, but we fear that, if we are to judge by the general run of
novels, it is not an age of prose.

A Cardinal Sin. By Hugh Conway. (Remington and Co.)

TO READ OR NOT TO READ

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 8, 1886.)

Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes:--

1. Books to read, such as Cicero's Letters, Suetonius, Vasari's Lives of
the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John
Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon's Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a
better one) Grote's History of Greece.

2. Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry,
the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not
the savants.

3. Books not to read at all, such as Thomson's Seasons, Rogers's Italy,
Paley's Evidences, all the Fathers except St.