The first of the three tales composing this little volume is entitled “The Race of Orven,” which supplies the character from whom is taken the title of the book. The other two are, “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks” and “The S. S.” There are three maxims on the titlepage, probably one for each of the tales,--one from Isaiah, one from Cervantes, and one from Sophocles,--but they are a triple key to the spirit of book altogether. The Prince, however, rules the contents entirely, pervading them with mysticism of every imaginable character. The “S. S.” tale is decidedly after the manner of Poe, full of mysterious problems in murders and suicides, to be treated with ingenious solutions. There is a morbid tendency running through the entire trinity, the author seeming to invent characters and complications only to exhibit his ingenuity in unravelling them, and in stringing on these ingenious theories the spiritual conceptions in which he is wont to indulge his thought. But the thought is both magnetic and bold, and rarely illusive. Hermitages, recluses, silences and funereal glooms, and the entire family of grotesque thoughts and things, are not merely wrought into the writer’s canvas, but are his very staple, the warp and woof composing it. It is an across-the-seas collection of conceits, skilfully strung on one glittering thread by a matured thinker. The attempt is made to carve out the mystery of things from the heart of the outward existence. The men and women on whom the scalpel is made to work are real flesh-and-blood entities, of such strong points of character as to be actually necessary in developing the author’s thought as much as his purpose. The book belongs to the increasing class that has come in with the introversive habit of modern thought and speculation--call it spiritual or something else.--_Boston Courier._ _Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers_, ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON, MASS. THE WOMAN WHO DID. BY GRANT ALLEN. _Keynotes Series. American Copyright Edition._ 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. A very remarkable story, which in a coarser hand than its refined and gifted author could never have been effectively told; for such a hand could not have sustained the purity of motive, nor have portrayed the noble, irreproachable character of Herminia Barton.--_Boston Home Journal._