Precisely who the great god Pan of Mr. Machen’s first tale is, we did not quite discover when we read it, or, discovering, we have forgotten; but our impression is that under the idea of that primitive great deity he impersonated, or meant to impersonate, the evil influences that attach to woman, the fatality of feminine beauty, which, like the countenance of the great god Pan, is deadly to all who behold it. His heroine is a beautiful woman, who ruins the souls and bodies of those over whom she casts her spells, being as good as a Suicide Club, if we may say so, to those who love her; and to whom she is Death. Something like this, if not this exactly, is, we take it, the interpretation of Mr. Machen’s uncanny parable, which is too obscure to justify itself as an imaginative creation and too morbid to be the production of a healthy mind. The kind of writing which it illustrates is a bad one, and this is one of the worst of the kind. It is not terrible, but horrible.--_R. H. S. in Mail and Express._ _Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed by Publishers_, ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON, MASS. DISCORDS. A Volume of Stories. By GEORGE EGERTON, author of “Keynotes.” AMERICAN COPYRIGHT EDITION. _16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00._ George Egerton’s new volume entitled “Discords,” a collection of short stories, is more talked about, just now, than any other fiction of the day. The collection is really stories for story-writers. They are precisely the quality which literary folk will wrangle over. Harold Frederic cables from London to the “New York Times” that the book is making a profound impression there. It is published on both sides, the Roberts House bringing it out in Boston. George Egerton, like George Eliot and George Sand, is a woman’s _nom de plume_. The extraordinary frankness with which life in general is discussed in these stories not unnaturally arrests attention.--_Lilian Whiting._ The English woman, known as yet only by the name of George Egerton, who made something of a stir in the world by a volume of strong stories called “Keynotes,” has brought out a new book under the rather uncomfortable title of “Discords.” These stories show us pessimism run wild; the gloomy things that can happen to a human being are so dwelt upon as to leave the impression that in the author’s own world there is no light. The relations of the sexes are treated of in bitter irony, which develops into actual horror as the pages pass. But in all this there is a rugged grandeur of style, a keen analysis of motive, and a deepness of pathos that stamp George Egerton as one of the greatest women writers of the day. “Discords” has been called a volume of stories; it is a misnomer, for the book contains merely varying episodes in lives of men and women, with no plot, no beginning nor ending.--_Boston Traveller._