Why will the heroes of historical fiction persist in that dangerous practice of leaving an angry and overmastered villain bound to a tree to await death or rescue? The result is rescue every time, and one way and another a mort of trouble for the good characters. Still it may be argued that if the protagonist of _The Fortunes of Garin_ (CONSTABLE) had not followed this risky precedent those fortunes would not have led him where they eventually did, and we should have missed one of the best costume novels of the year. Miss MARY JOHNSTON is among the very few waiters whom I can follow without weariness through the mazes of mediævalism. This tale of the adventures of a knight and a lady in the days when HENRY II. sat on the throne of England, and his son RICHARD princed it in Angoulême, is told with an air that lifts it out of tushery into romance. She wields a picturesque and courtly style, sometimes indeed a trifle too charged with metaphor to be altogether manageable (as for example when she speaks of "pouring oil upon the red embers of a score unpaid"), but for the most part admirably pleasing to the ear. Her antique figures are alive; and the whole tale goes forward with a various and high-stepping movement and a glow of colour that reminded me of nothing more than that splendid pageant one follows round the walls of the Riccardi Palace in Florence. Of course the journey ends in lovers' meeting and the teaching of his place to the evil-minded. The fact that this latter was called _Jaufre_, a name that I would wish kindlier entreated, is almost my only complaint against a lively and entertaining story which more than once rises to real beauty.
Given a plot of the conventional order I dare say it is best to make very little fuss or mystery about it. So, at any rate, "KATHARINE TYNAN" seems to think, for after about page 32 of her latest book, _Since First I Saw Your Face_ (HUTCHINSON), there is really almost no guessing left to do, the authoress seeming principally concerned to ensure a smooth passage for one's prophecies. Thus, while the unknown son of a secret marriage, happening by good luck to thrash the ostensible claimant to the title and heroine, gets that successful start in the early pages that is so necessary to his happiness in the last, and the lady never really looks like straying far into disconcerting opinions of her own, even the rival himself obliges us by throwing up the sponge just when the game should really begin. All this is soothing enough, but it is also very thin stuff; and the addition of a ghostly ancestress, who lures her descendants to midnight assignations by smiling at them out of a LELY painting, does not stiffen things much. The fact is that away from such a purely Irish subject as, say, "Countrymen All," Mrs. HINKSON really has not much to tell. Sweeney's New York Stores do not harmonise at all well with her atmosphere of wistful tragedy. The effect suggests a soap-bubble trying to cake-walk.