RECENT NOVELS.

THE VENGEANCE OF JAMES VANSITTART.* Mrs. Needell's story of a vengeance bitter and persistent enough to fill an entire life is in many ways a strong one. There is something almost mediaeval in the notion cf such a hatred. But the possibility of a mental condition like Vansittart 's being conceded, it would have been difficult to construct on this imaginary basis a more original plot, nor one offering more cleverly-arranged = contrasts. A night on the South Devon Coast is •toosen for the introduction of the heroine, Diana •Wiartens, to the reader. Without, "midnight, ■Mid one of Nature's brief pauses of completion, for, at the moment, the tidal river was at the full flow— heaving beneath the moon's rays like molten steel," and within the walls of the Charteris's home, a father apparently dying, and leaving a young girl as the only protector of his other children, the more helpless that his own errors have wellnigh reduced them to beggary. Unhappily, Herbert Charteris, perhaps because the measure of his capacity for evil-doinw is not yet full, lives on, and Diana, impulsive and generous, determines to sacrifice herself in order that those dear to her may no longer know the pangs of poverty. She has passed a season in London with her grandmother, Lady Meredith, and her grace and beauty have captivated Maurice Vansittart, the nephew and supposed heir of a fabulously rich uncle. Diana has given an evasive answer to Maurice's ofler of marriage. But suddenly, under the stress of her father's illness, she makes with the ill-fated young man a kind of matrimonial bargain, the conditions of which are very humiliating to his vanity. Diana's is a fine character. °She has firmness, and a courage that is brought out by the disastrous necessities in which she and her husband find themselves plunged by the elder Vansittart 's almost diabolical malice. If she has sinned against the better instincts of her woman's nature, the expiation is swift and terrible. Not only has she renounced all self-respect in her feverish desire to render her faniily prosperous, but also by her own act she has tied herself to a man whose weak nature, utterly unable to bear adversity, renders her life a perpetual martyrdom. The author evidently lingers with satisfaction over the portrait of Austyn Lloyd, the man whose stern virtue is a continual reproach to the wretched Maurice's purposeless sloth. Austin plays the part of mentor with too much complacency, and whatever may be the esteem accorded to his perfections, his relations with Diana, which are of the conventionally sentimental order, are responsible for whatever there may be of common-place in a novel that, with this exception, is unusually free from that quality. * The Vengeance of James Vansittart. By Mrs. J. H. Needell. 1 vol. London : Hutchinson aud Co.

THE INFANT.* Mr. Wicks, in a preface to his latest work, claims that it is founded ''upon the common-place social conditions...