love to man, and it is the passion of their lives. Of gossip and the wagging tongue of scandal, and of that vague, shadowy phantom, reputation, they reck not. These unsubstantial fleeting barriers are dissipated in an instant before the mighty breath of their omnipotent passion. Their love is the great fact of their lives. Why should it yield to less powerful sentiments, to inferior satisfactions. If the laws and sentiments of the commonalty of mankind oppose, why gain the lesser, palling pleasure of a fair character among our fellows whom we care not for, and lose the one joy of existence? Such, in all three of these novels, to a greater or less extent, is the theory of action of the female characters. They are however rescued from the last degree of actual crime in each case by the good taste of the author, feeling that such chapters had better not be written voluntarily in fiction, or perchance by his love for his proud maidens, whom he cannot taint with degradation in act, even if the sin upon their souls be wellnigh as black in the eyes of a strict judge, arbiter alike of the seen and the unseen. Such are hardly the conceptions wherewith the brain of a cultivated woman would teem. It were too glaring treason to her sex and to her own nature. Although it must be said that there is no word of coarseness or bold suggestion of wickedness to be found upon any page. So far from it, we scarcely find recognized the crime to which the maidens are tempted, and we half-ignorantly wonder at the existence of compunctions, excited at we can scarcely say what. But the author knew probably well enough, and if she were one of the sisterhood of women, then must she be isolated and at enmity with them all. Her hand is against every woman's and every woman's hand against her.