692 696 8. Washington Irving's Spanish Papers and Miscellanies Saturday Review, 9. Foolish Virgins 10. A Speculation for the City 11. Hymns 11. Life FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year,, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay a commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second The Complete work "( 20 66 50 66 220 "" Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. Can man not learn your blessed refrain, And pour spontaneous gratitude? - St. James's Magazine. O RECTORS too ritualistic, Supreme in these frivolous days? We've sown the strong storm democratic, To reap the fierce whirlwind, perchance; You come with your stole and dalmatic To lead us another long dance. The Church, in a cranky condition, Is trembling at thoughts of a fight; And now we've a Royal Commission, To tell us who's wrong and who's right. M. S. Say, how shall we choose 'mid the number Your modern discourses are dry. Supposing, instead of the quarrel, To settle what doctrines to teach, You gave up this gorgeous apparel, And found us some men who could preach? There's virtue, no doubt, in a vestment, The people may stare and may wonder, And don't leave us thus in the lurch; THE most faultless of novelists was roused to so much indignation by the contempt which it was the fashion fifty years ago to bestow upon novels and romances, that departing from her ordinary position of a dispassionate narrator of the emotions and experiences of fictitious characters, she rushed into a sudden impetuosity on her story of Northanger Abbey a vigorous defence of the tribe to which she belonged. Let us not desert one another' she said. We are an injured body :' own account and introduced into her granting the heart to be the seat of passion. to the reader. Bad grammar, bad morality, false sentiment, vapid dialogue, impossible incident, or none at all worthy of record, the poison and the bowl, with all manner of extravagance, or the tea table and the urn with all manner of insipidity, an absence of all truth and of all beauty: these are the From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes characteristics, negative and positive, of the are almost as many as our readers, and while works which crowd the fashionable circulatthe abilities of the nine hundredth abridger of ing library, and which the reader turns over the History of England, or of the man who listlessly, under that semblance of occupacollects and publishes, in a volume, some dozention to which honest idleness is much to be lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper preferred. On the other hand, the history from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, writing of the nineteenth century has asare eulogised by a thousand pens, there seems sumed many of the qualities of the highest an almost general wish of decrying the capacity, kinds of fiction. The bald manner of narand undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have rating facts which so wearied Catherine only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. Morland, or the stilted style which vexed 'I am no novel reader.' 'I seldom look into her, have almost disappeared. It is no novels.' 'It is really very well for a novel.' longer thought necessary to tell the events 'Do not imagine that I often read novels.' of the past in a tone altogether different Such is the common cant, and What are you from that in which occurrences of the presreading, Miss?' Oh, it is only a novel!' ent day are related; the notion of the digreplies the young lady, while she lays down her nity of history, which was the essence of its book with affected indifference, or momentary dulness, is set aside; language is allowed to shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda, be natural, the familiar incidents of daily or, in short, only some work in which the great-life are admitted occasionally into the recest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. And the heroine of the work in which this passage occurs, is made to say of history me. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing which does not either vex or weary The quarrels of popes and kings, with wark or pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. It is very tiresome, and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books. There is, in these strictures, some justice, though they are not wholly just. It is true that the best novels exhibit some of the highest powers of the human mind, and convey in an interesting form a knowledge of life and character in their outward shows, and of the interior mechanism of the heart; ord; nothing is excluded which can help to > is especially applied to. The French and English nations are the only rivals in this species of composition. Germany can hardly count half a dozen distinguished novelists; Italy cannot name more than two; Spain has only produced one; Sweden and Denmark between them may perhaps muster a dozen; but it must be added that the ac such complicated emotions and passions, such simple and pleasant sentiment, as the different phases of life represented in these volumes are made to evolve. vow, the betrayal, the struggle of ambition, | of domestic life which the word 'novel' the fall of power, the ecstasy of piety, the glory of martyrdom; all that makes up the great passionate drama of human life is open to their view; and pausing over the with astonishment, they say. Why, page, this is as exciting as a novel!' It is only the first-rate historian who can tell things thus; but the general aim of history now is to bring the dead to life, and if all are not tivity of these last named northern lands equally successful, not many fail entirely. in this kind of literature is rapidly augmentHistory, once parched and shrivelled, is re-ing. stored to warm and moving flesh and blood, A recent translation of the most remarklike one colonel in About's famous story, able work of the one famous novelist of who was laid by dried like a preserved ve- Spain, and another of one of the latest getable for fifty years and given back again novels produced by a charming Danish to the privilege of active existence by a re-writer, lead us to the present contemplation versal of the former process of dessiccation. of Southern and Northern life, and the The best novel and the best history may participation of such sympathies and forces, stand side by side, and though the one deals with fact and the other with fiction, many of the same qualities may be developed by the writer of either genus. A really good and true novelist may do excellent service to the historian; for a faithful image of the domestic life, internal and external, of men and women, must assist the explanation of the course of public events in their general progress, and we may learn in this way details of custom, of sentiments, and of ways of thought in distant lands, which it would be difficult to obtain from any other source. No history of China yet written introduces us into the heart and habits of the people so efficiently as that original novel by a Chinese author of genius, called in its English version The Chinese Cousins. Let any one who wants to know something of the interior of Chinese society, without running the risk of paying for the knowledge by a cruel death, or torture and imprisonment, betake himself to the charming pages of that writer. By consulting the skilled novelist, we may spare ourselves much travelling, much danger and much expense. We may rise superior to the troublesome laws of time and space; we may one day dip down into the warm regions of the South, breathe the perfumes of its delicious air, stir our congealed blood with its glowing sun, and assimilate its fervours, till we sink into soft languor; and the next day, deprecating that seducing lassitude, we may transport ourselves to the hard North, to brace our nerves and stimulate our energies, and enter into a sphere of action where there is more of pleasantry and less of passion. Not many countries, however, have been prolific in the production of that class of prose fiction representing the changing events We are indebted to Miss Augusta Bethell for a translation from the Spanish into intelligible English, and this is a rare merit with translators now-a-days. They are content, for the most part, with very slov enly work; with a slender use of the Eng lish vocabulary, and with none at all of English grammar. They substitute English words for foreign ones only till they reach one which it is difficult to render, and then they insert the foreign; and as for English construction, it is not so much as attempted. This negligence has become common even in translations from French, the language most generally understood; and we find in works supposed to be rendered from that tongue into English, such phrases as: Madame has to me the air pale;' or, if madame will well mount on horse, madame will no doubt find herself better i' or, it is equal to me-go your train.' It would be difficult to find a limit to the rapidity with which such stuff as this may be produced, and in this style the supply makes an immediate answer to the demand. The pub lisher, who would rather have the thing quickly than well done, is satisfied with the assurance that the translation is idiomatic; but it is not idiomatic; if it were idiomatic, it would give equivalent English for the French phrase; as it is, the reader must know French before he can understand such English, and if he knows French, why should he read garbled English? If he does arrive at understanding in a manner what the writer intends to convey, the performance must still be revolting to his taste and his good sense. This breed of mongre to which we are introduced, are full of such nothingness as generally belongs to the circles of fashion, of empty gossipings, of uninteresting scandal, and of that most tiresome of all forms of dialogue which consists of repart e without wit: a continual exhibition of damp damaged fireworks, which feebly fizz and will never go off. On the other hand the groups of peasantry gathering together in the village of Villamar are full of originality, of imaginative simplicity, of fervent faith, of the belief in things tongues ought to be resolutely put down; it ought to be exterminated by an unsparing criticism, for it is damaging to English literature, and familiarises ordinary readers and writers with the grossest errors of style. It is not only to be found in translations; it has crept into original compositions where the scene is laid in France. But if example is better than precept Miss Bethell's movement in the right direction will have more value than any amount of exclamation; and, therefore, we repeat that we feel deeply obliged to her for the perfect hon-unseen which lends the deepest interest to esty with which she has bestowed upon us English coin current with the true ring, in exchange for that of the Spanish mintage. It is strange that so powerful a work as the Gaviota should have been so long in finding an English translator, for it was written eighteen years ago, and public attention was pointed to its singular merits by an article in the Edinburgh Review in the year 1861, which gave a general survey of the productions of Fernan Caballero, the name which the novelist assumed in writing for the press. The fact that novel writing was so uncommon in Spain, added to that shrink ing from publicity which was once a feminine characteristic, induced the writer to keep her actual name carefully concealed, but by degrees her genius came to be recognised, and so did her identity. things seen, of warm affections, of keen We are indebted to the reviewer of the year 1861 for some details of her life. She is partly of German descent, her real name was Cecilia de Faber. Her father was a learned man; she was born in the year 1797, has been married three times, and is now a widow. Her earliest work was the Familia de Alvareda, written first in German and subsequently in Spanish, and it was submitted to the judgment of Washington Irving before it was published. The Gaviota, the subject of our present com- The links are not joined together in her ments, was written in French as well as chain. She introduces every fresh incident Spanish, and was produced some time after with a start, with a once upon a time,' or wards. Perhaps no novel has ever exhibit-one day it happened,' in the juvenile fairy ed national characteristics more vividly the characteristics of men and women de veloped under a special order of circum stances, of religion, of government, and of climate, including their different influences upon the lower and the upper classes of society. The movement of the story takes the reader first into the peasant's home, in a small village on the Andalusian coast, and afterwards into the drawing-rooms of Seville, and leaves him desiring a more intimate acquaintance with the Spanish peasantry, and unwilling to form any with the Span ish aristocracy The fashionable assemblies tale style; like a driver who urges his horses with a series of jerks, never commanding an equal pace; or a singer who has not mastered the gliding transition from one passage to another, which is known among musicians as the legato. The plot of the Gaviota is not intricate, and would have a sufficient, if not a very powerful interest, supposing it were better handled. In order to make our comments the better understood, we shall here give a short sketch of it. A young German surgeon, named Stein, having served in the war at Navarre, is re |