A deeper humanity is shown in the short story _Flitters, Tatters and the Counsellor_, which made its first appearance in this magazine in January, 1879. This sketch gained a quicker popularity than her longer novels, and drew forth warm eulogies from critics so far apart in standard as Ruskin, Leslie Stephen and Bret Harte. _Christy Carew_, in its picture of two middle-class Catholic families in Dublin, takes us back to the society described in _Hogan, M.P._, but its range is narrower and its theme rather social than political. It is a softer and more attractive book than _Hogan, M.P._, though, like that novel, it is devoted to a realistic picture of life. Miss Laffan's characters have the merit of being always real. They are often types, but they are never mere abstractions. Whatever their importance or qualities, they stand firmly on their feet, are individual and alive. Her men are drawn with a vigor which ought to ensure them from the reproach of being ladies' men. They may display traits of weakness, but these are due to no faltering on the author's part. In _Christy Carew_ the men are in a minority as far as minuteness of portraiture goes, and the most elaborate touches are bestowed on the two young girls who act as heroines, for the one is as prominent as the other. Christy and her friend Esther O'Neil present two types of girlhood. Esther, _devote_ and gentle, is a very tender, lovable figure, but there is perhaps more skill shown in the more contradictory character of Christy, a pretty girl addicted to flirting, keenly intelligent and impatient of the restraints and inconsistencies of her religious teaching, yet with an earnestness which makes her feel the emptiness of her life and vaguely seek for something higher. When each of the friends is sought by a Protestant lover their different ways of regarding the calamity are in keeping with their characters, and though any reader will agree with Christy that Esther was the more deserving of happiness, no one will be sorry that her own love-story should find a pleasant denouement. As an argument in favor of mixed marriages the book would have been stronger if Esther's lover had been separated from her only by prejudice, and not by unworthiness as well, but the pathos of the story is in no way marred by the neglect to clinch an argument. Like all Miss Laffan's novels, it is simple in plot. Construction is not her strong point, and though _Christy Carew_ has more story to it than her former books, it is by no means technically perfect. There is a certain hurry about it: its good things are not driven home, and effects upon which more skilful artists would dwell at length are dropped in a concentration upon other objects. The book, in the American edition, is also marred by numerous typographical defects that betray a singular laxity in proof-reading.