a most cold-blooded murder--this in a prologue. Then, when we get to the
real story, we find _Jane_ tapping out popular fiction at an amazing pace,
and her brother, _John-Andrew_, living on the proceeds thereof. _Jane_ is
noisy, vulgar, and successful in her own line, and gets on _John-Andrew's_
nerves; and when he discovers that she has for once turned aside from
tawdry fiction and written a play that is really good he decides that he
can stand it and her no longer. While she was pouring out literary garbage
he could just manage to endure his position, but the thought that she would
be hailed as a genius while he remained an utter failure was the final
stroke that turned him from a mendicant into a madman. I am not going to
tell you exactly what happened, but _Jane_ found a "way out," and with her
departure from this life my interest in the book evaporated. Mrs. HENRY
DUDENEY has notable gifts as a descriptive writer, and my only complaint
against her is that vulgar _Jane_ was not allowed to live, for in the Army
or out of it she was worth a whole platoon of _John-Andrews_. The
_Vagueners_, I may add, were not a little mad, but then they were Cornish,
and novelists persist in treating Cornwall as if it were a delirious duchy.

* * * * *

I don't think I can honourably recommend Mr. HUGH ELLIOT'S volume on
_Herbert Spencer_ (CONSTABLE) as light reading, though the ungodly may wax
merry over the philosopher's first swear-word, at the age of thirty-six, in
the matter of a tangled fishing-line, and may be kindled at the later
picture of a middle-aged sportsman shinning, effectively too, after a
Neapolitan who had pinched his opera-glasses. Fine human traits these in a
character which will strike the normal man as bewilderingly unlike the
general run of the species. The serious-flippant reader, tackling Mr.
ELLIOT'S elaborate and acute analyses, may get an impression of an
obstinate old apriorist, a sort of White Knight of Philosophyland, with all