Full of improbabilities, and becoming lurid with domestic tragedies at the end, this story has yet a sincerity and earnestness of style that may entitle it to be called respectable, among the mass of American stories. Novels are being sold by the five thousand which have far less ability in characterization or in grouping. The persons remain in one's memory as real individuals, which is saying a good deal; the dialogue, though excessive in quantity, is neither tame nor flippant; and there is an attractive compactness in the plot, which is all comprised within one house in an unknown city. But this plot soon gets beyond the author's grasp, nevertheless; she creates individualities, and can do nothing with them but kill them. The defects, however, are those of inexperience, the merits are the author's own. The value of her next book will probably be in inverse ratio to the success of this: should this fail, she may come to something; should this succeed, there is small hope for her. _Studies for Stories._ By JEAN INGELOW. Boston: Roberts Brothers. These narratives are probably called "Studies for Stories," as the catalogue of the Boston Public Library is called an "Index to a Catalogue": this being a profession of humility, implying that a proper story, like a regular catalogue, should be a much more elaborate affair. Nevertheless, a story, even if christened a study, must be criticized by the laws of stories and no other. Tried by this standard, we must admit that Miss Ingelow's prose, though possessing many merits, has not quite the charm of her verses. With a good deal of skill in depicting character, and with a style that is not unpleasing, though rather formal and old-fashioned, she has no serious drawback except a very prominent and unpleasant moral tendency, which is, indeed, made so conspicuous that one rather resents it, and feels a slight reaction in favor of vice. One is disposed to apply to so oppressively didactic an author the cautious criticism of Talleyrand on his female friend,--"She is insufferable, but that is her only fault." For this demonstrativeness of ethics renders it necessary for her to paint her typical sinners in colors of total blackness, and one seldom finds, even among mature offenders, such unmitigated scoundrels as she exhibits in their teens. They do not move or talk like human beings, but like lay figures into which certain specified sins have been poured. This is an artistic as well as ethical error. As Porson finely said to Rogers, "In drawing a villain, we should always furnish him with something that may seem to justify him to himself"; and Schiller, in his æsthetic writings, lays down the same rule. Yet this censurable habit does not seem to proceed from anything cynical in the author's own nature, but rather from inexperience, and from a personal directness which moves only in straight lines. It seems as if she were so single-minded in her good intents as to assume all bad people equally