flame; she has exquisite full lips, pouted with the breath of wonder, or disdain, or resentment, as the case may be; she has beautiful rounded arms, hanging with a languid grace; she is altogether a splendid and princely personage; and when, in addition to all this, Margaret becomes an heiress, it is somewhat hard to see her delivered over to the impoverished Manchester man, who is as ready to devour her as ever was an ogre in a fairy tale. The sober-minded who are readers of novels will feel Mrs Gaskell's desertion a serious blow. Shall all our love-stories be squabbles after this? Shall we have nothing but encounters of arms between the knight and the lady-bitter personal altercations, and mutual defiance? It is a doleful prospect; and not one of these imperilled heroines has the good gift of an irate brother to exchange civilities with the love-making monster. There is one consolation: Have we not in these favoured realms a Peace Society? And where could these most respectable and influential brethren find a fairer field?

There is one feature of resemblance between Mrs Gaskell's last work and Mr Dickens' Hard Times. We are prepared in both for the discussion of an important social question; and in both, the story gradually slides off the public topic to pursue a course of its own. North and South has, of necessity, some good sketches of the "hands" and their homes; but it is MrThornton's fierce and rugged course of true love to which the author is most anxious to direct our attention; and we have little time to think of Higgins or his trades-union, in presence of this intermitting, but always lively, warfare going on beside them. Mrs Gaskell has made herself an important reputation. The popular mind seems to have accepted Mary Barton as a true and worthy picture of the class it aims to represent; and Ruth, though a great blunder in art, does not seem to have lessened the estimation in which her audience hold her. Ruth is the story of a young girl betrayed and fallen while little more than a child-innocent in heart, but with her life shipwrecked at its very earliest outset; and Ruth is the sole heroine and subject of the book.

The vain attempts of her friends to conceal the irrecoverable downfall of this poor child-the discovery that comes after many years her humility and devotion and death-are, of course, the only circumstances in which the author can place her unfortunate heroine; the mistake lies in choosing such a heroine at all. Every pure feminine mind, we suppose, holds the faith of Desdemona-“ I do not believe there is any such woman;" and the strong revulsion of dismay and horror with which they find themselves compelled to admit, in some individual case, that their rule is not infallible, produces at once the intense resentment with which every other woman regards the one who has stained her name and fame; and that pitying, wondering fascination which so often seems to impel female writers to dwell upon these wretched stories, by way of finding out what strange chain of causes there was, and what excuse there might be.

We will only instance one other young writer touched by the spirit of Jane Eyre, the author of the Head of the Family; but the long and most tantalising courtship of Ninian Græme, the hero of this book, with its "many a slip between the cup and the lip," is redeemed by the fact that it is the lover here who is humble, patient, and devoted, and not the lady. There is a great deal of talent in this lady's works, and a great deal of love. Alas! for this hard world, with all its rubs and pinches ! how soon it teaches us the secret of harder struggles than those of love-making. In the last work of this writer, Agatha's Husband, we have plenty of quarrelling; but these are legitimate quarrels between married people, lawful sport with which we have no right to interfere, and which the author describes with genuine relish, and with no small truth.

We suppose it is a natural consequence of the immense increase of novels that the old material should begin to fail. It is hard to be original in either plot or character when there are such myriads of "examples" treading in the same path as yourself, and prior to you; and many a shift is the unfortunate fictionist compelled

to, if he would put some novelty into his novel. We have before us at this moment two different books, which we are constrained to class together as novels of disease. The House of Raby is a tale of a family afflicted with insanity. We have first some legendary information about a "wicked earl," whose madness is furious and vicious, but scarcely known as madness to the world. Then comes his son, an amiable and worthy gentleman, who falls in love, and is refused by a virtuous Margaret Hastings, who is deeply attached to him, but thinks it a sin that he should marry. In this view the gentleman coincides for a while; but ultimately gets rid of his conscientious scruples, and marries his cousin. Then comes a second generation, the twin sons of this couple, of whom one inherits the family malady in periodical fits, but in his sane intervals shows the greatest genius, takes an important place in society, and has no weakness about him. This is the hero; and he falls in love with a second Margaret Hastings, the niece of the former one, whom, however, more self-denying than his father, he never wishes to marry, but is content to have a very fervid and loving friendship with. Margaret is a clergyman's daughter, and, being left with no great provision, accepts an appointment as housekeeper at Carleton Castle, the ancestral house of the family, where she has always been a friend and favourite, and lives there, taking care of her lover in his dark hours, and enjoying his society when he is in his proper mind,-all with the fullest sanction of his elder brother the earl, and Margaret's friend the countess; and so the story ends. With less incident, and also with less interest, Miss Jewsbury follows in the train of the anonymous author of The House of Raby. The hereditary malady is the most shadowy possibility in the world in the family of Constance Herbert; but her mother, in whose blood there is no such disease by descent, becomes suddenly mad, and settles into a hopeless idiot. Constance, too, has an Aunt Margaret Aunt Margarets are fashionable in novels-and when she is in all the joyful excitement produced by her

young lover's first declaration, she is carried away for the first time to see her mother, and is told how the case stands with her, and how she is bound not to marry, lest she should transmit to others this dreadful inheritance. Such is the argument of these books; and they form one of the many modern instances of super-refinement and improvement upon the infallible laws of nature and revelation. That there could be anything which possibly might make up to the unfortunate supposed children-for whose sake Arundel Raby will not marry Margaret, nor Constance Philip-for the great calamity of being born, our authors do not seem to suppose; but Miss Jewsbury's heroine, when she feels herself very miserable, takes refuge in abusing Providence and God for her dreadful privations, and for the cruel injustice of creating her under such circumstances. Indeed, Miss Jewsbury's opinion seems to be, that the only business which God has to do with at all is to make His creatures happy, and prevent those discourteous ills and misfortunes from laying hands upon them; and when grief does come, the unfortunate afflicted person has full permission to upbraid the great Author of his misery, who ought to have paid attention to it, and taken means to stay the evil; nay, is quite justified in refusing altogether to believe in the existence of the careless Deity, who will not exert himself to keep troubles away. This, indeed, seems a very fashionable doctrine in these days, when we have all become so very much kinder and more charitable than the God who preserves the life in these ungrateful hearts. Now, we cannot help thinking it a great error to make any affliction, like that of hereditary insanity, the main subject of a story. It is permissible as a secondary theme; but a thing out of which no satisfactory result (according to our carnal and mundane ideas of happiness) can come-is not a fit central point for fiction. The position of the lady housekeeper and her lover patient, alternately a madman and a genius, is in the highest degree uncomfortable, and we cannot reconcile ourselves to it in any shape; and we have seen few books so perfectly unsatisfactory as Constance Herbert. The

anonymous author has the advantage of Miss Jewsbury-there is always interest, at least, in the House of Raby.

There is one other class of books, written "on principle,” and in which some very pleasant results have been attained-books which we will not call "religious," but rather "Church" novels. The Heir of Redclyffe and Heartsease are important individuals in this family. There is no accounting for the wonderful rise of the "bubble reputation" in many instances; but though we cannot admit that these books deserve all the applause they have got, they are still very good books, and worthy of a high place. The best thing in the Heir of Redclyffe, to our judgment-though not the pleasantest is the wonderful impersonation of a "prig" in Philip Morville. This intolerable coxcomb, solemn and faultless, does-with the best intentions-the villain's work in the book; and we have no patience with the cruel murder of the good young Guy, to make room for this disagreeable cousin. Heartsease, too, is very clever and lively, and has a great deal of character in it. And there are other unobtrusive books of the class, which, putting aside their High-Churchisms, and all the little martyrdoms their heroines suffer in the cause of districtvisiting and Dorcas societies, have much shrewd appreciation of common life, and a quiet eye for a piece of oddity. Such books as Katherine Ashton, in spite of their occasional tedium, are by no means bad fare for the young ladies of the party they represent; and any little bit of fanciful harm that may be in their mild Puseyism is more than counterbalanced, in our opinion, by a great deal of substantial merit.

We cannot deny that, in this second rank of eminence, the magnitude and variety of the female professors of our art do somewhat pale the glory of our literary craftsmen of the nobler sex, though it is true that the Broad Church, in the stalwart person of the Rev. Charles Kingsley, is rather more than a match even for the Heir of Redclyffe, the most notable of the High Church novelists. Yet Mr Kingsley himself will scarcely hold his own by he side of some of the lady-writers

whom we have already mentioned. We do not intend to discuss the merits, as a novelist, of this stout and boisterous champion of popular rights, and of the unspeakable latitudes of doctrine to which a man may reach, while still he sits under the shadow of the Prayerbook and the Thirty-nine Articles, as under his own vine and his own fig-tree. Mr Kingsley is a speculatist, and not a born story-teller, and we leave him for the present.

Nor are we sure that we are quite justified in placing the name of an American in the foremost rank of our own secondary eminences. If " the American language" has gained a certain right, by its own peculiar elegances, to be distinguished from the mother tongue, American novels are still more individually characteristic. Our good neighbours and cousins are too smart not to exhaust rapidly all the ordinary" sensations" of everyday existence. Adventure with them is exhausted in the humorous slang stories of the backwoods; they have little history to fall back upon; their art is still either elementary or borrowed; and their fashion-alas the day!-is a wonderful development of what human foolishness may come to if it is but sufficiently pertinacious. In these circumstances, it is not wonderful that a morbid investigation into great secret passions and crimes—that a tinted and half-perceptible horrorand that the new science which is called "anatomy of character," should be in great request among them. For ourselves, we have small admiration of the spiritual dissecting-knife, however skilfully handled, and very little tolerance for the "study of character," which has been quite a fashionable pursuit for some time past. We would prefer, for our own individual choice, to be "taken to pieces" in a neighbourly way, and with legitimate gossip of all our antecedents and circumstances, than to have a small committee "sit upon" our character and idiosyncrasies in every intellectual family with which we had the misfortune to be upon visiting terms. The books of Mr Hawthorne are singular books: they introduce to us not only an individual mind, but a peculiar audience; they are not stories into which you enter and sympathise,

but dramas of extraordinary dumb show, before which, in darkness and breathless silence, you sit and look on, never sure for a moment that the dimly-lighted stage before you is not to be visited by the dioramic thunders of an earthquake, falling houses, moaning victims, dismay and horror and gloom. Had the reputation of this gentleman been confined to his own country, it would have been out of our sphere of comment; but he has had great popularity on this side of the Atlantic, where we understand he is now resident, and his books have perhaps excited the public curiosity almost as much as the books of Miss Bronte. The Scarlet Letter glows with the fire of a suppressed, secret, feverish excitement; it is not the glow of natural life, but the hectic of disease which burns upon the cheeks of its actors. The proud woman, the fantastic and elfish child, the weak and criminal genius, and the injured friend, the husband of Hester, are exhibited to us rather as a surgeon might exhibit his pet 66 cases,” than as a poet shows his men and women, brothers and sisters to the universal heart. In this book the imagination of the writer has been taxed to supply a world and a society in accordance with the principal actors in his feverish drama. The whole sky and air are tropical; and instead of the gentle monotony of ordinary existence, its long, wearing, languid sorrows, its vulgar weariness and sleep, we have a perpetual strain of excitement-a fire that neither wanes nor lessens, but keeps at its original scorching heat for years. The landscape is parched and scathed; the breeze is a furnace-blast; the volcano is muttering and growling in the depths of the earth; there is an ominous stillness, like the pause before a great peal of thunder. Nor is the air once clear, nor the fever dissipated, till, with a sigh of relief, we escape from the unwholesome fascination of this romance, and find ourselves in a world which is not always tending towards some catastrophe-a world where tears and showers fall to refresh the soil, and where calamities do not come from the blind and mocking hands of fate, but mixed with blessings and charities from the very gates of heaven.

VOL. LXXVII.—NO. CCCCLXXV.

We

The House of Seven Gables is not less remarkable nor less unwholesome than its predecessor. The affectation of extreme homeliness and commonplace in the external circumstances, and the mystery and secret of the family with which these circumstances are interwoven, is very effective in its way; and if it were not that its horrors and its wonders are protracted into tedious long-windedness, we would be disposed to admire the power with which these figures were posed and these situations made. But we are never contented with manufactured stories. If they do not grow with a sweet progression of nature, they may please our eye, or flatter, with a sense of superiority to the multitude, our critical faculties; but we cannot take such productions into our heart. Hephzibah Pyncheon is, perhaps, the most touching picture Mr Hawthorne has made, and her first attempt at shopkeeping, with all its little humiliations and trials, is a pitiful picture, true enough to reach the heart. can understand how the poor old gentlewoman cries over the scattered sweetmeats which roll over the floor when she lets them fall. We can comprehend her nervousness, her pride, ber self-humiliation. There is a spark of human kindness in her, as there is a touch of delicate art in the cankereaten roses in the old desolate garden; and her devotion to her brother, uncouth and awkward as its demonstrations are, has something pathetic in it. The brother himself is one of those peculiar individuals who owe their existence to the spiritual anatomist whose business it is to "study" his neighbours. Clifford's perfect selfishness is only an intense development of love for the beautiful, says his biographer. Hephzibah's shy and awkward tenderness disgusts and irritates rather than delights him, because it is his natural instinct to seek beauty, and there is nothing lovely in the withered ancient lady, in spite of the deep love at her heart. If we are not mistaken, Mr Hawthorne calls this "poetic," this heartlessness of his hero, and certainly endeavours to elevate it into something higher than the common hard selfishness which we are accustomed to, both in the world and in novels. Whatever it may

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be in America, we should be greatly disappointed to find the poetic temperament resolved into this vulgar sensualism in our own more sober world. A nice eye for external beauty, and a heart closed to all perception of the beauty of other hearts, may make a voluptuary, but will never, with any amount of talent added thereto, make a poet. The character is fit enough for Harold Skimpole, and comes in admirably to make up that capital sham; but we entirely reject and disbelieve it in any personage of more serious pretensions. It has just originality enough to strike a casual observer, or a rapid reader, as something new;" but we know of nothing more repellant or obnoxious to common humanity, than a man who rejects, and is disgusted by, honest affections and tenderness of which he is entirely unworthy, because, forsooth, they are not lovely in their outward manifestations, and he has an eye for beauty," and a fastidious taste, which cannot endure anything that is not attractive to the eye.

In the death-scene of Judge Pyncheon, we are wearied and worried out of all the horror and impressiveness which might have been in it, had its author only known when to stop. Perhaps there is scarcely such another piece of over-description in the language. The situation is fairly worn to pieces. Throughout the book this is the leading error. Everything is dwelt upon with a tedious minuteness. The motion is slow and heavy. The story-teller holds our buttons and pours out his sentences all in the same cadence. We feel ourselves compelled to submit and listen to the long story. But even the power and fascination it undoubtedly possesses, does not impel us to forgive the author for this interminable strain upon our patience. Like the wedding guest in the Ancient Mariner, we sit reluctantly to hear it out; and when it is done, and no adequate reward is forthcoming of either wisdom or pleasure, we are injured and indignant, and do not understand why we have been detained so long to so little purpose. For it is no particular gratification to us to know how Mr Hawthorne studies his subjects-how he sets them in different lights, like a hild with a new toy, and gets new

glimpses of their character and capabilities-we want the result, and not > the process-the story completed, but not the photographs from which it is to be made.

In the Blythedale Romance we have still less of natural character, and more of a diseased and morbid conventional life. American patriots ought to have no quarrel with our saucy tourists and wandering notabilities, in comparison with the due and just quarrel they have with writers of their own. What extraordinary specimens of womankind are Zenobia and Priscilla, the heroines of this tale! What a meddling, curious, impertinent rogue, a psychological Paul Pry, is Miles Coverdale, the teller of the story! How thoroughly worn out and blasé must that young world be, which gets up excitements in its languid life, only by means of veiled ladies, mysterious clairvoyants, rapping spirits, or, in a milder fashion, by sherry-cobler and something cocktails for the men, and lectures on the rights of women for the ladies. We enter this strange existence with a sort of wondering inquiry whether any events ever take place there, or if, instead, there is nothing to be done but for everybody to observe everybody else, and for all society to act on the universal impulse of getting up a tragedy somewhere, for the pleasure of looking at it; or if that may not be, of setting up supernatural intercourse one way or another, and warming up with occult and forbidden influences the cold and waveless tide of life. We do not believe in Zenobia drowning herself. It is a piece of sham entirely, and never impresses us with the slightest idea of reality. Nor are we moved with any single emotion throughout the entire course of the tale. There is nothing touching in the mystery of old Moodie; nothing attractive in the pale clairvoyant Priscilla-the victim, as we are led to suppose, of Mesmerism and its handsome diabolical professor. We are equally indifferent to the imperious and splendid Zenobia, and to the weak sketchy outline of Hollingsworth, whose "stern" features are washed in with the faintest water-colours, and who does not seem capable of anything but of making these two women fall in love with him.