Wo have received from Messrs. Kelly and Walsh, La., the publ ninth number of Lise Boehm Coast Talos." It is a story of the Tientein Massacro of 1870, thie massacre which Chung How might have prevented, but did not, snd which the war with Germany which broke out at about the same time prevented france from avenging at the time as it degervod. As a picture of life in Tientsin at the time, it is admirable. The author assures us that "no attempt has been made to caricsturo individuals, but rather to portray types of ordinary occurrence," but every resident who has spent, say, five years in China will fool that he recognises the characters; more as in hor former my friends, like pieces of pottery, more quickly by their flaws than by their conformities to the normal. The Tientsin Massacre itself is only touched on, being used to bring about the catastrophe. The hero of the story is a disagreeable third assistant" in the British Consular Sorvice—we presume he has retired on a pension by this time,—who is engaged to the only woman in the book that the reader can really like, and it is difficult to forgive her for being willing to marry the hero. The hero, his fiancee having been sent home for, is made a fool of by a designing young Frenchwoman with an unsuspecting English husband, and nearly shares her fate in the historical massacre.
We have noticed before, and here we are forced to notice again, that writers of stories and books dealing with foreign social life in China are much too prone, among the numerous histories of which every treaty port is full, to choose the unpleasant ones for reproduction in print, so that the distant reader acquires the false conviction that our life out here has hardly " redeeming point in it, and that the occasional foreign residents who: are not rogues are fools, and so easily' become the victims of the rogues. We: fully recognise Lise Boohm's conspieuous* ability, her insight into character. and her' powers of description; but it is a musonm+ full of unpleasant things in bottles, not* a gallery of pleasant pictures with sua-shine and storm mingled in the proportion which nature loves, to which her clever pen introduces us.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.