aim which are not the common qualities of Irish writers. In beginning her career as a novelist she had the courage to refrain from the pursuit of those finer artistic beauties which lure to failure so many writers incapable of seizing them: she even put aside the question of plot, and strove to give a sound and truthful representation of life and manners. That end was gained with masterly success. No one reading the anonymous novel _Hogan, M.P._, would have been likely to set it down from internal evidence as a woman's book: it is one of the stoutest and most vigorous pieces of fiction which have appeared for years. We can find no trace of its having been reprinted in this country, and are at a loss to account for the omission: its distinctively Irish character ought to form an attraction. _Hogan, M.P._, is a political novel as realistic as Anthony Trollope's, but more incisive in tone and wider in scope. Instead of confining her energies to the doings and conversations of one set of people, Miss Laffan looks at politics as they are mirrored in society, sketching not alone the wire-pulling and petty diplomacies, but phases of life resulting therefrom. In _Hogan, M.P._, we have a vivid _coup d'oeil_ of Dublin society, with its sharp, irregular boundaries, its sects and sets, its manner of comporting and amusing itself. The field is a wide one, but Miss Laffan has the happy art of generalization--of portraying a whole society in a few well-marked types. There is no confusion of character, and though we seem to have shaken hands with all Dublin in her pages, from great dignitaries to school-boys, the picture is never overcrowded.