Mr. Hardy's New Book.* " Life'sLittlelronies " is well called. Indeed, with the omission of the adjective, the name might serve as a collective title for the whole series of Mr. Hardy's novels. Over all there broods an ironical fate, making a sad muddle of human plans,andnever so malicious as when itlets mortals have their way. It is this inexorable presence which gives to Mr. Hardy's novels their sombre hue; this, assisted by his Wessex peasants' patient, unconscious philosophy, which is itself a sort of fatalism ; assisted, too, by the author's habit of contemplating life not merely in its hey-day, but in the hoursof deepen- ing shadow-not merely as a brief draught of passion, but as a cup which must be drunk to the bitter lees. bIr. Hardy's preference for sad endings is the natural expression of his philosophy. It is the autumnal aspect of life which is uppermost in " The Son's Veto," a movingly natural story arising out of one of those strangely-assorted marriages of which Mr.Hardy is sofond.A.Wessex clergyman marries his house- xmaid,adaughter of thevillage.In the sequelwe see her a widow, musing away the long hours in a London suburb, while her son is away at a public school. Chancing, one wakeful night, to be watching the market-carts working up to London, she suddenly recognizes in one of the wagoners the figure and gait of a long-forgotten sweetheart. Recognition leads to a revival of acquaintance, and this in turn to revived tenderness, finding an outlet in surreptitious but innocent journeys on the nightly market-cart. Divided by the gulf of education from her son and his surroundings, she is seized with a craving to rejoin her old life and to end her days in her native village as the wifo of her former lover.But at the gate of this Eden stands her Oxonian son, like the angel with the flaming sword, forbidding her to enter. "For Con- science' Sake " teaches the cynioal moral that a man seeLing to repair a sin of his youth may make matters worse. A late atonement may be worse than no atonement at all. In " A Tragedy of Two Ambitions " it seems as though nothing else were needed to realize the radiant visions of two self-made younr clerics except the removal of their incubus-a drunken leech of a father. One night the incubus stumbles into the mill dam, and his sons lift no finger to save him. Yet fate mocks them. Prosperity comes not; theyhave sinnedto no purpose. Inanother story an ambitious wife, not satisfied with the harvest reaped from one seafarin- ventuire, goads her husband and sons to another. We leave her a white, wan figure,ever starting up in the watches of the night to listen for footfalls that are destined never to come. What story, again, is more fitted to people the downs above Wey- mouth with ghosts than " The Melancholy Hussar " ; and who more grotesquelv pathetic than the deserted husband in " The Fiddler of the Reels." rending the air with laments, not for the loss of his faithless wife, but for the loss of the bastard child she had brought with her ? In this last story Mr. Hardy uses with effect a situation resembling that tragic one in " Tess of the D'Urbervilles,"--a situation arising out of the incapacity of the peasant-born woman to see that her having borne a love-child to another man might render her less desirable as a wife. But Ned Hiperoft, himself a peasant, takes it less to heart than Angel Clare. Of all the stories, however, in the earlier part of the book, the best, in spite of minor improbabilities, is that of the young barrister weho, in an idle moment, strolls among the merry- go-rounds on a gala night at Melchester. Here fate is in its most monloyish mood. All three actors are its playthings-the poor girl who gets her mistress to write her love-letters,the mistress who is drawn by a sort of animal sympathy to throw her own soul into these effusions, and the young man, whose conscience is quickened by their fine caligraphy and spiritual tone into offering to marry their author. Too late he discovers that he has married some one else. As poor Anna and her husband-he sunk in dreary resignation-start off upon their life- journey, we realize the irony of this involun- tary atonement. The volume also contains a string of shorter stories, under the title of " A Few Crusted Characters." A native of the village of Long- puddle, on his way back thither atter a long absence, finds himself in the carrier's wagon in company with the postmistress, the school- master, the master-thatcher, the curate, the parish clerk, the local painter, and ona or two other inhabitants of the village. One after the other, for the information of the returned native, they take up the story of this or that dead local worthy. Some of these tales are humorous even to grotesqueness, some are simply quaint, some are grim and gloomy. One or two illustrate the mixture of sentiment with apathy which is characteristic of Mr. Hardy's villagers -as in that tale of the brothers who exchange their betrothed on the eve of the wedding. Far sur- passing its fellows, however, is the tale of Andrey Satchel's nuptials. Every line of this is primed with the richest. quaintest humour, subtlv con- trasted with the everyday tragedy which makes the wedding a matter of urgency. Long will they live in literature-this couple locked up in the tower.until such time as the groom shall be sober enough to take his part decorously; the parson and parish clerk, carried away by " the sounds of the horn and the hounds," scouring the country side, all oblivious of the stoical pair in the tower; these, on their part, deterred by shame from tolling the bell for assistance. Once more we are constrained to confess the power with which Mr. Hardy tells the life-tales of his 11'essex folk-a race in which we seem to recognize the be<l-rock of our Anglo-Saxon nature, stripped of the artificialities of complex life. *' Life's Little Ironies, and A Few C'rusted Charac- ters." By Thomas Hardy. Osgood. bllivaine, and Co. MR. HARDYrS NEW BOOK.*