Wilkie Collins 
The Queen of Hearts 

Mr. Wilkie Collins can tell a story well, and he has an ingenious knack of stringing stories together. After Dark consisted of a series of stories, and admirable they were, and ‘The Queen of Hearts’ is a work of the same description. The author lives in the region of fiction; but he does not aim at the higher objects contemplated by the more gifted writers of his class. He does not affect to be profound, philosophical, or didactic. His great object is so to write as to sustain interest and to amuse. But, though he does not aim at anything beyond that, thanks to his sympathies with many of the better qualities of human nature, he achieves something much higher.