Mrs. Annie Edwards's last book[K] does not open well in point of style. The first paragraph of the first chapter is: "She was a woman of nearly thirty when I first saw her; a woman spiritless and worn beyond her years," etc. This beginning not only a chapter but a book with a pronoun implying an antecedent is very bad, in the low and vulgar way of badness. It brings to mind the superhuman daily efforts of the "American humorist" of journalism to be funny; and it should be left to him and to his kind. And in the next paragraph Mrs. Edwards describes her heroine as "walking wearily along the weary street of Chesterford St. Mary." Bad style again, and this time in the way of affectation. A man's way may be weary if he is tired or weak; but not even then should it be so called, when he has just been spoken of as weary himself, or as walking wearily; and weary as applied descriptively to a village street is almost nonsense. These defects are not important, but they arrest attention as being at the very opening of the story. And it must be confessed that for a chapter or two "A Point of Honor" is rather slight in texture and commonplace. It is, however, interesting enough to lead us on, and the reader who holds his way into the third or fourth chapter is repaid. The authoress then warms up to her work, and begins to show her quality, which is that of a true literary artist. We do not say a great artist, be it observed, but a true artist. She paints only _genre_ pictures; but unlike most works of that class (on canvas at least), they are not mere representations of pretty faces and pretty clothes. She works with a real knowledge of the human heart, and her work is full of feeling. She does nothing in the grand style; even her most loving women do not have grand passions; but all her work is truthful and warm with real life, and her earnest people are really in earnest. The story of "A Point of Honor" is interesting, although its incidents are not all out of the common way. Gifford Mohun, the handsome young heir of Yatton, an estate in Devonshire, loves, when he is only twenty, one Jane Grand, a beautiful and sweet-natured girl who is only a year younger than himself. Nothing is known of her history. She herself does not know her own parentage. All this has been concealed from her at her father's request, and with some reason; for it comes out that she is the daughter of a felon, who died in the hulks, by a minor French actress, a modification of whose name, Grandet, she bears. When she knows this, she refuses to taint Mohun's name and life with such dishonor, and he accepts her decision; doing so with two implications on the part of the authoress: first, that he was selfish in doing so at all; next, that doing it he did it coldly and with a false affectation of feeling. He leaves Yatton and its neighborhood, and plunges into dissipation. Jane remains at Chesterford, leading her solitary life and loving him. Meantime the vicar, Mr.