ge Yankee, whose avocation is planting English children in
Canada after the manner of Miss Rye. Settle is a preposterous failure,
but every other limb of the writer's argument is strong and operative.

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 excepti