Regained" his best work, and the authoress of "The Young Lord” considers the hero of her story an excessively manly interesting personage. There is something very annoying in this perverse fondness of a writer for a character whose every trait jars upon the reader's sense of justice and propriety; and if the author possess, as in the present case, any considerable powers of delineation and truth of expression, the sense of annoyance almost becomes one of torture. According to our authoress's own description, "the young lord" is an overbearing young man, excessively fond of power, with the personal characteristics of a loud voice and prominent eyes; and to the reader he can scarcely fail to appear as very selfish, very mean and very stupid. Such a character is, of course, a very proper one for the purposes of fiction, and is described in these volumes so clearly and thoroughly, that we are almost inclined to regard it as an addition to that band of beings whom genius has added to the ranks of living men; but it is excessively irritating to be told by the authoress at every other page, that we ought to applaud when we are only intent upon laughing, and that what we have been viewing as a ridiculous effigy we ought to have bowed before as a great and good example.

The story opens with a letter from a certain Captain Moore to Lord Singleton (the father of "the young lord"), requesting him to become his daughter's guardian in the event of his own death, and containing the following

passage:

In the accompanying paper you will see that I have taken the liberty to associate with your lordship's name the name of your son. My Lord, you have, I trust, many happy years before you. According to all human calculation it will be so; yet life is at the best uncertain, and a father must not build the welfare of a child on one foundation.

My reason for requesting Mr. Beauchamp to be, in conjunction with your lordship, my daughter's guardian, is the same which I mentioned in speaking of yourself. I have seen Mr. Beauchamp but once; he may not have noticed me; but on that single occasion I observed in him, young as he is, the same principle of rigid integrity for which his family is remarkable.

When a father appoints a boy of fourteen, whom he has only seen once,

and even then not spoken to, guardian of his little girl of about six years of age, he of course makes the best preparation in his power for rendering her a heroine. Common sense might be inclined to urge some objections to such an arrangement; but we do not, for it has been the means of providing us with a very delightful novel, and some very exquisite writing.

The following extracts explain themselves:

"Look out, Annette dear, and see if your father is coming; this suspense is dreadful."

66 No, mamma. Poor, poor Hugh! What must he be feeling?" and the tears ran down Annette's cheeks.

"Such a loss will indeed be irreparable," said Mrs. Beauchamp; "but while there is life there is hope."

"Here he comes! Oh! mamma, I am sure there is no hope in his face. Poor, pour Hugh," and she burst into tears.

Mr. Beanchamp, whose return was expected, was a distant consin of Lord Singleton's. He exercised an office that was both

that of agent and adviser. The property of Lord Singleton was very large, and required much care and trouble.

*

A clear head, and good knowledge of business, had made Mr Beauchamp a valuable adviser to Lord Singleton; and as such, he had been established for three or four years with his wife and children at a pretty house in the park, commonly called the Cottage.

Mr. Beauchamp hastily entered the room, Dead!" and said, in a voice awed and broken, Then, as he threw himself into a chair, great portly man as he was, he wept.

The young lord falls into a kind of stupor on the death of his father, and

all other means having failed to rouse him, Mr. Beauchamp proposes to his daughter Annette, that she should endeavour to interest him by her conversation.

"There will be nothing, dear, to do," said her father. "Just let the poor boy talk, which he will do to a woman more easily than to a man; that is all. Never prepare comfort for anybody, it never does; that I can tell you from experience."

"No, the spontaneous action of the feelings is the proper one," said Mrs. Beauchamp.

Annette was devotedly fond of her cousin Hugh-cousin as he called himself, though in fact the relationship overpast the bounds of real cousinship-nevertheless she did shrink from her present duty. She could not even fancy him unhappy; and when towards evening her father came to fetch her, her heart was inwardly trembling like an aspen leaf.

All this portion of the story is told with great patience, and falls upon the reader's heart like fragrant summer dew. Nothing is described; every thing is inferred; and the delicacy with which the authoress touches our feelings almost leads us to be unjustly forgetful of her skill, as we are unmindful of the sun in the midst of the soft beauty of the twilight. Patience is a great power in the hands of the novelist, and is too often neglected. Writers are too fond of suggesting motives and refining on characters, when, if they would but leave the reader to himself a little, he would clothe their groups with his own memories, and colour their pictures with his own passions. An incident quietly told, a detail delicately given, and allowed to sink into the reader's mind or heart, have a more powerful effect than whole pages of disquisition or description, however vivid; and of this truth the novel before us is a good example, for of its three prominent characters the two respecting whom the authoress talks and argues with the reader most, occupy a far less important place in the reader's attention, than the one who is simply presented to his notice with a few natural touches.

On recovering from the illness into which he is thrown by his father's death, one of the young lord's first acts is to arrange that his young ward

should reside with his relatives, the Beauchamps; and after some resistance on her part, she at length arrives.

Sybil Moore was beautiful; not, perhaps, with perfect beauty, but with many of its elements. Her hazel eyes were large, soft, and piercing; her dark chestnut hair shone in the lamplight; and her skin, even after the heat and cold of a journey, was as

smooth as it was white and dazzling. There are many who depreciate the beauty of complexion, because it is not of so high an order of beauty as beauty of feature. They undervalue its charm; but a fine complexion is a lovely thing, and, if not of the highest order, is a beauty that gives great pleasure. Sybil Moore had it in perfection, and Annette for a few moments gazed at her with wondering admiration. She had hardly decided, howe ver, that she never had seen so fair a face, when her opinion underwent some change. The small lips were closed with a cold and rigid air, and her haughty and womanly manner sat unpleasantly on her youthful ap pearance. She sighed as she feared her new companion might prove hard and repulsive. But again a more favourable opinion was formed,

"It is a long journey, Miss Moore," Mr. Beauchamp began. I fear you must be much fatigued?"

"Not at all, thank you," was the short, stiff answer.

The railway is less tiring than a close fly," continued Mrs. Beauchamp, anxious to make some conversation. "Our roads here are hilly, and, I confess, I find the way from the station unpleasant and inconvenient."

"I hate the railway," said the young lady, decidedly," and the last part of the journey was by far the best."

"Lord Singleton would be pleased to hear you say that," said Annette, smiling; "he does not like to have the roads abused; does he, mamma?"

Sybil drew herself up with a look of su preme indifference, and the conversation dropped.

The experienced novel reader will be able to form a tolerably good idea, from those portions of the story we have extracted, of its chief outlines; but perusal alone can give any just idea of the pure and even swelling flood of pathos with which it rolls on to its conclusion. The steadfastness of a woman's spirit, the waywardness of a woman's heart, the tenderness of of woman's love, are pourtrayed in its pages with a sweetness and a womanliness, if we may so say, of expression, which are very refreshing after the superabundance of Amazonian talent which has been poured upon us during the last ten or twenty years. But at the same time, at the risk of appearing to contradict ourselves, we inust observe that our authoress has been led into an occasional coarseness of feeling and sentiment, from overstrained allegiance to a false type of character. The young lord is her hero, and she follows wherever he

leads; sees only with his eyes until he becomes blind, and then tries to force her readers to lend him theirs. Nor is this all; for those characters whom she has taken most pains to present in a favourable light are ruthlessly thrust aside, if they stand in the way of her favourite; and she never fails to be herself unjust, if it appear to her that she can thereby do her hero greater justice. Because the young lord is inspired with a kind of brickand-mortar religion, which makes the building of churches an article of faith, and regards the discipline of parochial schools as of considerably greater importance than the lessons that are taught in them, she has thought right to hurl a torrent of sarcasms upon one whom she has described truthfully and well as a humble-minded, devout, minister of religion, and whose only fault is that he does not possess the energy of a parish overseer, or the instincts of a street orderly. An energetic superintendence of the poor, and a diligent pursuit of the means best calculated to alleviate their condition, are, doubtless, noble adjuncts to the Christian character in the present time; but it is a mistake to regard them as the whole body of divinity, and a still greater mistake to sneer at those whose temperament unfits them for dealing with builders' contracts, or deciding between the various systems of school-craft. The full vase bears but little stirring.

EVELYN MARSTON.*

IT has been the chief triumph of modern chemistry to force what had formerly been regarded as refuse to yield valuable products; and modern literature, whilst making daring incursions into new fields of fancy and thought,

has been no less solicitous to re-traverse those paths from which a superficial glance would consider every flower to have been plucked. It is, indeed, scarcely too much to say that all the greatest efforts of modern literature have been reviews of the mental verdicts of past times; and it may almost be laid down as a principle that the greater an author's mind may be, so much the more prone is it

39

to discuss those truths which the world has agreed to call trite, and to reflect on those sentiments which superficial knowledge or over-familiarity have declared commonplace. Genius refuses to regard anything as exhausted; and it is fortunate that it is so, or we should soon have all the world branded with mediocrity.

The novel before us is another example of this tendency of original thinkers to re-write the old. The story is the old one of the young girl, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who falls in love with a poor man of genius, whom she marries in spite of her father's expostulations; she is turned out of doors, and suffers a long continuance of privation and misery, but, at the close of the book, regains, by a sudden change of fortune, her former position in society.

In writing such a story as this at the present day, an author is not so much an author as an actor; the characters have already been drawn for him by other hands; long usage has rendered the points traditional ones, and any alteration in the established positions is more likely to startle than to please. What remains for him to do, then, is to render the passions of the story with some show of reality; and to weep real tears on his stage, as Mrs. Siddons used to weep them on hers. He can expect no aid from the novelty of his fiction, and must be the more earnest, therefore, in obtaining it from his new representation of the truth. In "Evelyn Marston," Mrs. Marsh gives many proofs that she was quite aware that it had little claims to originality, and seems to have determined to render it so distinguished for excellence of detail, polish of language, and tenderness of sentiment, as to be capable of interesting all classes of minds without the intervention of exciting plot or startling catastrophe. We consider that her success has been complete, and although we like one or two of her novels better, there is none which is more eloquent or passionate.

JOHN HALIFAX.

No bunch of seaweed plunged in wa ter spreads out with brighter colours, or clearer, tenderer outlines, than

those which this story displays as it sinks into the reader's heart. It is a summary of life and a catalogue of its passions, as the rose is a summary of the beauty of summer, and the forests are a catalogue of the years that are It does not address us in the gone. manner of most fictions, with sly inuendo and flippant argument, but rather discourses with itself, as the wind discourses with itself in the echoing defiles of mountains. It is a prose poem, of which goodness and beauty are the metre and the rhythm. It is a rhapsody on the joyfulness of a pure life. As Johanna Baillie illustrated the human passions by writing a tragedy and a comedy on each, so has Miss Mulock illustrated, in "John Halifax," each of the great phases of human life by two pictures, not opposed to each other, nor even contrasting, but taken from different points of view, and thus, by a kind of mental stereoscope, enabling us to form a solid and real conception of what, under any other treatment, could at the best have been merely picturesque.

The very plan of the book involves in itself a great truth; a truth of which there are wild glimpses in Don Quixote, and coarse illustrations in Paul de Kock's L'Homme de Police et l'Homme de la Nature. It proposes, and nobly works out the idea, to show that whatever of good or great is taught to man by the stern, sad lessons of life, exists originally in his own nature in far greater vigour and brilliancy, and would never cease to bless him, would he only keep himself pure. This is the text to which "John Halifax" is the sermon, as summer is the music to which its flowers are the words.

The story of "John Halifax" is placed fifty years since; a time which is memory to the old and tradition to the young; a time than which there has been none more momentous to England, none more widely interesting to the world. The choice of such a period by our authoress was evidently no careless one, and the energy of the public life and spirit at that time is well matched with the striking individual character of her story. Of the wisdom of the introduction of characters which the lapse of time is rendering historical, amongst the creations of fiction, there must be greater doubt. Lady Hamil

ton, for instance, is introduced to us by name, and made to take part in the story, and vigorously attacked. She, whom the tasteful Romney thought all worthy to be the model for the purest creations of an artist's fancy-for Miranda and St. Cecilia; whom the delicate minded Hayley loved to describe as a noble, simple, truthful actress; and whom the proud queen of the Sicilies rejoiced to call her friend, is described in the novel before us in the flippant, mock-polite manner of a police report. It is a cruel blow-and it comes from a woman's hand.

The main thread of the story consists of the rise of a poor boy from the utmost poverty and destitution to affluence and distinction. This is a subject dear to all Englishmen, because all Englishmen are acquainted with living illustrations of it; there are, in fact, so many wealthy men who have begun the world with less than five shillings, that eager aspirants after fortune must be almost tempted to commence their career by the distribution of any cash they may possess above that moderate sum. But the hero does not obtain his social elevation simply by means of his great business talents and steady adherence to the principles of morality. Our authoress is well aware that sentiment has as much influence on the practical affairs of life as the weather on the corn market in autumn; and friendship, as well as fortune, holds out her hand to aid John Halifax in the busy strife.

The story, as we have before said, bears throughout a twofold aspect, and the scenery is always nicely cho sen to suit each. The vast tanyard and the huge water-mill, bright with light and strong with shadow, which are the great instruments of fortune to the favored family of the story, are so associated in its pages with kindliness of heart, that we are almost led to believe that friendship shares with industry the honor of being the philosopher's stone.

We commend this novel to our readers; and to those who object to novelreading we can recommend its perusal as a portion of their serious studies. Better novels may have been written, but none with a finer purpose, or capable of leaving a more excellent impression.

CAN Sardinia afford a war with Austria? is the stern question of those who see, in the unequal resources of the two countries, little to hope for the emancipation of Italy. Can a

nation which numbers not one-sixth of the population carry an aggressive war into the territories of its now powerful neighbour, and, with an army of, at the very utmost, eighty thousand men, assail a force of triple or quadruple amount, in a country abounding in fortresses, and every resource of which is already at their command? There are no words which could exaggerate the inequality of such a contest, nor is there one single element which the struggle could evoke that would diminish that disparity. The line of attack is limited to a comparatively small extent. It must be through the space between the Alps and the Duchies; or, in other words, it must be by an open country, where there are few natural defences, and only adapted for the operations of large masses of

men.

Widely extended flanks, unsupported by any advantages of position, require great resources in cavalry, in which Austria is eminently superior; and in artillery, where her strength is equally conspicuous; and lastly, the devotion to the cause of Italian independence, which many well-minded but ill-informed persons attribute to the inhabitants of Lombardy, has no existence whatever in fact. Between

the Piedmontese and the Lombards there is no feeling of friendship; the

In

only sentiment is that of jealousy and dislike; and were the peasant of the Milanais to choose to-morrow, he would infinitely prefer the rule of the German, such as in all its stern severity he has known it, than to form part of a "united Italy" of which Piedmont should be the head. fact, if there be anything more than another to damp the ardor and diminish the sanguine hopes of those who dream of Italian independence, it is this very rivalry, this mean and narrow jealousy, which sets every state of the Peninsula against its neighbour. The old grudges of longpast centuries are treasured as traditions of hate, and the cruelties of ages gone by are almost the only chronicles which are valued in their history. Nor has Austria been slow to profit by this unworthy feeling; with all her native craft she has ministered to it in a hundred ways. For years has it been the congenial labor of her press to exaggerate and widen the difference between the Lombard and the rest of Italy; to contrast, occasionally with truth, the prosperity he enjoys with the poverty under which his neighbour is struggling; and to ascribe to the sway of a paternal government the benefits which are most justly attributable to habits of industry and economy so essentially inherent in the Lombard character. Well knowing, besides, that the spirit of the nobles can never be with her, that every instinct of their order must be to hate those from whom they have met nothing but insult and outrage,