With Mr. Jones's previous works--with "Judah," "The Crusaders," "Saints and Sinners"--"Michael and his Lost Angel" is connected by strong, albeit not too evident, links. The bent of Mr. Jones's mind, or the effect of his early environment, seems to force him into showing the struggle between religious or priestly training, and high and sincere aspiration, on the one hand, and, on the other, those influences, half earthly, half divine, of our physical nature, which sap where they cannot escalade, and, in the highest natures, end always in victory. There is nothing in Michael Feversham of the hypocrite, little even of the Puritan. Subject from the outset to priestly influences, and wedded to theories of asceticism, the more binding as self-imposed, he has come to look upon the renegation of the most imperative as well as, in one sense, the holiest functions of our nature as the condition of moral regeneration. _Sic itur ad astra._ Crime, generally, he holds as condemnable, but murder and theft are things aloof from the human nature with which he has to deal. They are exceptional products of diseased organisations or untoward surroundings. Not one of his flock that he is conducting peacefully and unwittingly to Rome, is coming to him to own in confession to having stolen an umbrella from a rack or a book from a stall, still less to having slain his enemy on a secret path. Had such confession been made, it would have been an episode of comparatively little interest, a mere skirmish in the war he constantly sustains against the forces of evil. Uncleanness, on the other hand, as he elects to describe it, is the one offence against the higher life, in regard to which, whether as concerns inward promptings or outside manifestation, it behooves him to be ever armed and vigilant. Accepting this theory, which, though subversive of the highest and most obvious aims of nature, is still held by a considerable section of civilised humanity, the conduct of Michael wins a measure of sympathy. In imposing upon Rose Gibbard the unutterably shameful and humiliating penance, the nature of which reaches us from the ferocious Calvinism of the Puritan rather than from the gentler moral discipline of the Romish church, to which he is hastening, Michael is thoroughly sincere and conscientious. He believes it the best, nay, the only way to save her soul and restore her to the self-respect and dignity of pure womanhood. So much in earnest is he that, when Mrs. Lesden propounds the theory, which among the virtuous and generous wins acceptance, that "it is nearly always the good girls who are betrayed," he resents the utterance as a levity, not to say a profanity. A character such as this is not only conceivable, it is well known. There is nothing in its psychology to scare the unthinking or alarm the vulgar. In the humiliation which Michael is himself compelled to undergo, I find at once the vindication of a morality