As good as the foregoing novel is there is much stronger and subtler work in “Prince Saroni’s Wife” and the “Pearl-Shell Necklace,” two short stories that well illustrate Mr. Hawthorne’s peculiar power. Each is of a tragical cast, and the latter especially has at times a dramatic intensity that becomes almost painful. Mr. Hawthorne, as did his father, embodies his most tragical conceptions in such simple and direct language, that the spell wrought upon the reader does not pass with the reading, but remains long after the book has been laid aside. There is a psychological value, too, in Mr. Hawthorne’s work, which rewards a close study of his characters. One feels that he is not a mere story-teller, but, as well, an acute analyzer and a close student of human nature in some of its most perplexing phases. “Prince Saroni’s Wife” is the tale of an Italian prince, and “The Pearl-Shell Necklace” is a story of American life. Both of them are well worth the reading, and told with a clear-cut strength and directness which mark the writer as a literary artist as well as a man of genius. Dr. Hammond’s second novel, “Dr. Grattan,” is not equal to his first in power, freshness, and dramatic sense, qualities which partly redeemed the crudeness and extravagance of the latter book. “Lal” was in many ways a notable work, and though the work of a prentice hand in the art of novel-writing, had plenty of strength and vigor in it. In “Dr. Grattan” one must confess to a feeling of disappointment, as the story is a trifle dull, and none of the characters have any of the _vraisemblance_ of flesh and blood, except a few of the village loafers and loungers, who haunt the village store of the Adirondack town, where the scene of the story is placed. Dr. Grattan, the hero of the book, is a middle aged country physician, who has one fair daughter, and who is pictured to us as a noble specimen of a man, in his physical, mental, and moral attributes. Mr. Lamar and his daughter Louise are personages of a singular cast. The father is a monomaniac, though a gentleman and a millionaire, and the daughter a superb and glorious woman, endowed with all the noblest qualities of her sex. The main animus of the book is apparently to show that a middle-aged country physician may have a justifiable taste for novel-writing, to while away the intervals of medical practice; and that he, if well-preserved and good-looking, even if encumbered with a pretty daughter herself marriageable, may win the superb and glorious woman before mentioned for a second wife. Both of these points the author establishes to his own satisfaction. There is enough material to make a very good story, but we do not think Dr. Hammond handles it with as much skill and deftness as might be woven into it. The style is slipshod and careless, and such as one might fancy would be the instinctive method of an author who had rattled off the matter at race-horse speed very much as a woman would reel off a skein of worsted.