At His Gates. By Mrs. Oliphant. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
The author of _Miss Marjoribanks_, who is said to keep writing first a good novel and then a poor novel in careful alternation, will leave her friends in some doubt as to which category she means her last story to be placed in, for it is impossible to call it poor, and conscience-rending to call it good. It is long, and depicts many persons, of whom only one, Mr. Burton's cynical wife, is at all original. Mr. Burton aforesaid, a pompous business-man, places "at his gates," just outside his villa walls, the widow of a man whom he has used as a catspaw. The catspaw was a guileless artist, whom Burton has tempted to take a directorship in his bank when the latter was about to break, he himself retiring in time. The poor painter, in despair, jumps into the water, and his wife, who is proud and aristocratic, is condemned to be the pensioner and neighbor of a vulgar villain, every favor from whom is a conscious insult. Presently the tables are turned. Whether the asphyxiated artist really comes undrowned again, and returns rich from America, nothing could persuade us to tell, as we disapprove of the premature revelation of plots. But the tiresome Burton, at any rate, is bound to come to grief, and his headstrong young daughter to run off with his partner in atrocity, a man as old as her father, and his wife to adapt her cold philosophy to a tiny house in the best part of London. There is one scene, worth all the rest of the book, where this lady tries to bargain with her son, whom she is really fond of, for a manifestation of his love: she is about to yield to his opinion that she should give up her own private settlement to the creditors of her ruined husband, and then, just as she is consenting to this sacrifice, not disinterestedly but maternally, the boy blurts out his passion for a _parvenu_ girl, the lost painter's daughter in fact--a rival whom he introduces to her in the moment of her supreme tenderness. She simply observes, "You have acted according to your nature, Ned--like the rest." If there were ten such chapters in the book as the one containing this scene, the novel would be something immortal, instead of what it is--railway reading of exceptional merit. It forms the first of a "Library of Choice Fiction" projected by Messrs. Scribner, Armstrong & Co., of which it forms a very encouraging standard of interest.