Finally, Mr. Bourchier dies, splendide mendax to the end. A confession, he rightly argued, would break up the harmony of the family circle, particularly as his eldest son had married the daughter of his luckless victim. Few criminals are so thoughtful for others as Mr. Bourchier is, and we are not without admiration for the unselfishness of one who can give up the luxury of a death-bed repentance. A Cardinal Sin, then, on the whole, may be regarded as a crude novel of a common melodramatic type. What is painful about it is its style, which is slipshod and careless. To describe a honeymoon as a _rare occurrence in any one person's life_ is rather amusing. There is an American story of a young couple who had to be married by telephone, as the bridegroom lived in Nebraska and the bride in New York, and they had to go on separate honeymoons; though, perhaps, this is not what Mr. Conway meant. But what can be said for a sentence like this?--'The established favourites in the musical world are never quite sure but the _new comer_ may not be _one among the many they have seen fail_'; or this?--'As it is the fate of such a very small number of men to marry a prima donna, I shall be doing little harm, _or be likely to change plans of life_, by enumerating some of the disadvantages.' The nineteenth century may be a prosaic age, but we fear that, if we are to judge by the general run of novels, it is not an age of prose. A Cardinal Sin. By Hugh Conway. (Remington and Co.) TO READ OR NOT TO READ (Pall Mall Gazette, February 8, 1886.) Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes:-- 1. Books to read, such as Cicero's Letters, Suetonius, Vasari's Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon's Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote's History of Greece. 2. Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry, the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants. 3. Books not to read at all, such as Thomson's Seasons, Rogers's Italy, Paley's Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire's plays without any exception, Butler's Analogy, Grant's Aristotle, Hume's England, Lewes's History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything. The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.