tolerance of _Lady Harman_ in her dealings with the tea-shop girls. You see one instinctively pays Mr. WELLS the serious compliment of assuming that he has something material to say about the things which matter. * * * * * As a demonstration of the irony of history, I can hardly imagine a better subject for romance at the present moment than the fortunes of WILLIAM OF ORANGE, and if Miss MARJORIE BOWEN'S _Prince and Heretic_ (METHUEN) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of Nassau and the ravaging and looting of the Netherlands by ALVA, Defender of the Catholic Faith and servant of the House of Hapsburg; but he cannot conjure up out of his crystal the sight of a Catholic Belgium suffering these things, three hundred and fifty years later, at the hands of a Lutheran King allied with a Hapsburg and fighting for the sake of no cause but his own vanity. Most of the action takes place in Brussels--a Brussels placarded with squibs against CARDINAL GRANVILLE; and the final retreat of WILLIAM, ruined in everything except his spirit, to join the army of the PRINCE DE CONDE, has a pathetic significance to-day that not many historical romances can claim. Miss MARJORIE BOWEN has a remarkable gift for the presentation of a number of lifelike portraits against a vivid and gorgeous background, and the successive pictures of the Dutch and Flemish Schools which she creates in _Prince and Heretic_, make it, if not quite so successful as _I Will Maintain_, at least a book which no lover of the Lowlands can afford to miss. * * * * *