She knows more about the vanities of this world than about this world's
visions, and a possible garrison town is better than an impossible ghost-
land.

That Other Person, who gives Mrs. Alfred Hunt the title for her three-
volume novel, is a young girl, by name Hester Langdale, who for the sake
of Mr. Godfrey Daylesford sacrifices everything a woman can sacrifice,
and, on his marrying some one else, becomes a hospital nurse. The
hospital nurse idea is perhaps used by novelists a little too often in
cases of this kind; still, it has an artistic as well as an ethical
value. The interest of the story centres, however, in Mr. Daylesford,
who marries not for love but for ambition, and is rather severely
punished for doing so. Mrs. Daylesford has a sister called Polly who
develops, according to the approved psychological method, from a
hobbledehoy girl into a tender sweet woman. Polly is delightfully drawn,
but the most attractive character in the book, strangely enough, is Mr.
Godfrey Daylesford. He is very weak, but he is very charming. So
charming indeed is he, that it is only when one closes the book that one
thinks of censuring him. While we are in direct contact with him we are
fascinated. Such a character has at any rate the morality 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.