OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
In Tess of the D'Urbevilles (published by Messrs. OSGOOD, MCILVAINE & CO.), Mr. THOMAS HARDY has given us a striking work of fiction, bold in design, and elaborate in finish. The characters, with one exception, are as true to life as are his graphic descriptions of nature's own scenery; true that is to the types of such rural life as he professes to represent,—the life led in our Christian country by thousands and thousands of genuine Pagans, superstitious Boeotians, with whom the schoolmaster can do but little, and the parson still less. As to the clergymen who appear in this story, two of them are priggishly academic, a third is a comfortable antiquarian, and the fourth unacquainted with even the A.B.C. of his own pastoral theology.
