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From The British Quarterly Review.
WORKS BY MRS. OLIPHANT.*

the

The Macaulays of posterity, if there be any gratitude in them, will surely avow If we may judge from the publishers' ad- themselves indebted to this generation for vertising lists and from the critical columns the mass of solid, reliable, social history of the reviews, there is at this moment a embodied in its novels. Supposing a case: sensible decline in the power of Women's Should the Church of England, as a State Novels, an indication that the feminine ge- religion, not see the century out -an eventnius of this generation has touched its high-uality we could not affect to deplore water mark, and that the ebb has begun. clerical annals of Mr. Thackeray, Mr..AnNo general vote of popularity has exalted thony Trollope, George Eliot, and Mrs. any young authoress into sudden fame and Oliphant will be of some service. As long fortune for some years past. We who re- as any library preserves a copy of them, it member the acclaim that greeted Currer will be difficult to assert, without risk of Bell' and 'George Eliot,' listen in vain for contradiction, that it fell by the corruption any thrill of the same universal voice. Mr. of its parish clergy; from amongst them Thackeray's daughter has draped his mancame the Puritans of Elizabeth's and James's tle very gracefully on her shoulders, but she days, the Nonconformists of the Restoration requires a cultivated taste for her due ap- Period, and the Methodists of the Georgian preciation, and a cultivated taste is not the Era; leaving in the Church, it cannot be taste of the majority; Miss Braddon keeps honestly denied, with many of a different up her name and multiplies her editions, character, as good livers and as pious dibut her clients are of the lower intellectual vines as themselves, who were yet sincerely order. In default, therefore, of any new attached to its constitution. star of the first magnitude in the literary firmament, we are truly thankful for the favourite old luminaries who rose above the horizon twenty years since, and still go on mildly shining over the waste of literary waters that heave and rock all round this restless and reforming age; and for none are we more thankful than for Mrs. Oliphant, perhaps the fullest, steadiest light of them

all.

Most of us can admit, now that we are far enough away and safe from the fires of Roman bigotry, that the Roman monks and missionaries did some excellent work; so, possibly, when the old Church of England is gone, and the generations to come review it in the living pictures of these nineteenth century novelists, they may feel that its past is worthy of much respect. The poet and the imaginative writer of Nonconformity, the Milton and the Defoe of this generation,

* (1.) Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Mait-have yet to arise; and surely in the ancient land, of Sunnyside. Written by Herself.

(2.) Lilliesleaf.

(3.) Merkland.

(4.) The House on the Moor.

(5.) Harry Muir.

(6.) Adam Græme of Mossgray.

(7.) Magdalen Hepburn.

(8.) Laird of Norlaw.

(9.) The Atherlings.

trials and persecutions of Nonconformists and in their present life there are true elements of poetry for talent to combine.

In

Rufus Lyon,' George Eliot has done justice to a somewhat eccentric type of Nonconformist minister, but the majority of the best-known sketches of Nonconformity, lay or clerical, are mere caricatures by persons who know it only from the outside. For a true and sympathetic view of modern life amongst Dissenters, we want a writer born and bred in dissent, and with that endowment of genius which is the gift of God. We shall give him a warm welcome when he appears; and the world beyond us will, no doubt, give him a warm welcome too.

Mrs. Oliphant manifests a lively interest in every system of ecclesiasticism with which she is acquainted; and, as she expounds

- but they all please us more or less from their likeness to the people we know. As an artist she is akin to Miss Austen, but much more diffuse. She makes us smile often, but she very rarely moves us to tears, either by her pathos or her tragedy, for she encumbers both with too many words. She describes everything with precision, and by the time we have done with the piled-up anguish, we are too familiar with it, and too weary for sympathy. This is a fault, but when an artist gives us such fair pictures of middle-class life, in fair flowing English, we are more than contented, though they may not bear the sign-manual of genius.

their various developments in common life, | best when she refrains her pen from the she makes her readers share this interest. highest humanity. Her picture-gallery is She wishes us perfectly to understand that full of every-day people — a crowd of them she does not consider Christianity to be the exclusive property of any sect; in her philosophy, one religious profession is as good as another, and she preaches her principles of tolerance from this text in some of the cleverest novels that the language boasts. She is a very prolific writer, and her method has naturally undergone modifications; we will not say that her tone has changed, but it has certainly relaxed; and is now just so much easier than at first as the South is softer than the North. It was with a distinctly serious intent that she portrayed, many years ago, the Scotch minister in his manse, in both poverty and riches, prosperous in quiet days, and then involved in the It is curious to observe to what opposite dissensions of the kirk to the loss of his liv- styles of fiction the term Novel is applied. ing; but since she left the bracing air of What a gulf lies between ‘Lady Audley' moor and moss, and settled down in the and Mrs. Margaret Maitland,' for instance; good society of Carlingford, within a pleas-yet non-discriminators, whose principle it is ant distance of London, where most people to distrust and denounce all fiction, shake are brought up in the old-fashioned ortho- their wise heads at them both as common dox way of having a great respect for reli-Three-volume Novels,' blindly classing gion and as little to do with it as possible,' them in the same category; though the first she has gradually acquired more and more is a resuscitation of the notorious poisoner of the airs and manners of Carlingford, and Brinvilliers, enacting a series of modern has learnt to indulge in a vein of sarcasm crimes, and the second is a beautiful sermon when talking of the clergy which is no doubt in action on pure and holy living. These extremely entertaining to light-minded per- perverse lovers of mere facts are now, howsons, but to the serious is gravely reprehen- ever, an insignificant and daily decreasing sible. In this vein she gives us an Arch- minority. This is a reading generation, deacon of the Broad Type; Rectors High and it must have literary provender of one Low, and Negative in their views: a Per-sort or another. The store of old facts is petual Curate responsible only to his Bishop, necessarily limited, and the supply of new and a poor Curate, with a poor spirit to ones is not enough for its needs; besides, match, responsible to his Rector's wife; many old facts are worn threadbare, and and more incisively than any of these, she not all are valuable or wholesome; indeed, limns a Nonconformist preacher, a young we think that some real lives would be betgenius fresh from Homerton, writhing in the ter forgotten, and many events that have alternate embraces and clutches of his flock, happened would be as well lost in the mists and his low-bred friend who, casually occu- of antiquity. The magazines are so numerpying his pulpit, makes an' it,' and ulti-ous now that they are hard put to it for mamately supersedes him in his office of pas-terials to fill their pages, and an industrious tor to the delightful Carlingford connec- collector for one of those most deservedly tion' worshipping at Salem Chapel.

6

popular, gave us lately a nightmare of murIt will be seen that Mrs. Oliphant's cleri- ders as Old Stories Retold.' They are cal portraits are numerous, and we allow true- they are undeniable facts; neverthethat they are well done. Nor will we com- less, we are distinctly of opinion that the plain that there is no very pure or lofty most sensational of blood-and-thunder rospirit amongst them no Curate Crawley, mances would be infinitely less likely to or Rufus Lyon. She knows her own strength prove harmful than are these cold, elaborate