which we find to it in literature are slight and scarce, and its own records can scarcely be called literary. There was a mystic yearning after some harmonizing truth lying beneath the decaying creeds of the age which prepared the way for all that was deepest in the path of Christ, although it perhaps somewhat opposed that impulse by which Christianity conquered the world; and there was a profound sense of blank and emptiness, a gaze of longing turned back to the past, a weary sigh, a feeling of the littleness of life, such as we are accustomed to fancy a peculiarly modern feeling; in some form it may have existed in every age, but the form which it then took seems often to mirror the life of our own. Mr. Pater, at any rate, seems to us to find his interest in that intellectual exercise afforded by the translation of the feelings of one age into the dialect of another. We read of "the religion of Numa" in the age of Marcus Aurelius, and we think of the contemporaries of John Henry Newman; we watch the fading of this antiquarian piety, and we think of such characters as that revealed to us in the "Memoirs" of Mark Pattison. When the Voltaire of the age appears upon the scene we are somewhat disappointed; and yet it is an actual dialogue which (if our memory serves) is reproduced in substance from Lucian. Apuleius reproduces, if not any distinct individuality of modern life, at least much of its vague mysticism, but his literary gem seems to us a little out of place here. The picture of the faith which was new then, and is old now, though it suggests no modern counterpart separate from itself, yet seems to recall the problems of our day as the morning recalls the evening twilight. We are left somewhat puzzled as to the impression meant to be conveyed of Christianity, which the hero does not embrace, but in supposed martyrdom for which he dies, and which "seems to define what he might require of the powers, whatsoever they might be, that had brought him into the world to make him not unhappy in it." He is impressed by the image of "a young man giving up, one by one, the greatest gifts, parting with himself and that deep and divine serenity of his own mind, yet from the midst of his distress crying out upon the greatness of his success, as if foreseeing this very worship; " yet this impression is no dominant influence in his nature, and we are left to understand, apparently, that he stood aloof from the faith that impressed his imagination as from some rightful lord of a part of his nature that made a claim upon the whole. The gospel of culture will not blend with any other gospel; we are only surprised to find that it leaves so large a space for a possible rival.

*

The two novels we have just noticed paint the confused condition of thought in our day better than many an essay or sermon, but in a review of contemporary fiction we have no excuse for longer delay over books interesting mainly from that point of view. Mrs. Humphrey Ward's pleasant and popular novelette leads us to another region. From the similarity of the title, and some other reasons quite as superficial, "Miss Bretherton" recalls "Miss Brown;" both deal with the relation of life to art, and both avoid all variety of incident, and depend for their interest on the delineation of an aspect of life. But "Miss Bretherton" is as free from the vigour as from the unpleasant qualities of "Miss Brown," and may be described as eminently * "Miss Bretherton." By Mrs. Humphrey Ward. 1 vol. Macmillan & Co.

a book to lie on the drawing-room table. The pleasantness of a view of life in which every one is attractive, happy, and rich, and in which the principal personage has a supposed actual prototype, has won it a popularity which from a critical point of view is somewhat below the approval which we should have anticipated being able to give to any work of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's, and we are surprised at the lack of character-painting; there is hardly a speech which, barring unsuitability of circumstance, might not be given to some other than the actual speaker. However, there is much originality in the first conception of the heroine, an amiable actress whose beauty has won for her an amount of popularity, rapidly ebbing as the story begins, which she imagines to be due to the genius she does not possess. But with the stroke of a harlequin's wand this genius is bestowed on her when we are half-way through the book, and all that comes after this transition illustrates, to our mind, the mistake already touched on, of considering genius a suitable object for art. The public, there is no denying it, is of another opinion.

We are again brought in contact with the stage by Mr. James Payn's sparkling picture of an incident of the past. The curious taste of the eighteenth century towards literary masquerade is one of its most remarkable peculiarities. Chatterton, Ireland, and the strange impostor who called himself Psalmanazar, each seem to have merely gone further and further in the direction opened by Defoe and followed out by Southey in his "Letters of Espriella;" the notion of writing as somebody else gradually developing into literary forgery. The deceit seems in the fiction harshly punished, and we confess to a feeling of sympathy with the poor impostor of seventeen which makes us angry with Mr. Payn for having given him so much excuse (he had much less in reality). What right has an author to bring over his readers into sympathy with an unscrupulous conspiracy? As that has been the effect on one reader, we should think the book must be very immoral, and, as it is also entertaining, it ought to be very popular. Its vraisemblance is a little spoilt by the hero being only seventeen, but this is what an author must expect who borrows from the wild improbable ground of reality. A worse piece of improbability, and one for which history indignantly disclaims all responsibility, not having provided William Henry Ireland, at that early age, with a mistress to be either cruel or kind, is that the heroine withdraws the heart she has bestowed on the poor forger on the discovery of this peccadillo. The night which sees "Vortigern " hooted from the stage by a crowded audience at Drury Lane sees William Erin's betrothed rejoicing over his being unmasked in time to prevent her union with him. This is what a woman feels who learns of heartless treachery and cruelty in the man she loves; it does not seem to us a kind of change to be produced by the discovery of what, after all, was a schoolboy's trick on a vast scale. A generous rival is the only person who takes a merciful view of the hero's sins; it is to his generosity that he escapes premature detection, and to his charity that, after being unmasked, he owes the means of livelihood. It is disappointing, but not surprising, to find that nature is responsible for the impostor, and Mr. Payn for his generous and compassionate benefactor. * "The Talk of the Town." By James Payn. 2 vols. Smith, Elder & Co..

The excursion into the past is altogether a very refreshing one after the endless pictures of contemporary life we have to contemplate, and we hope it will not be the last we shall have from Mr. Payn's crisp and rapid brush.

Mr. Collins* is an equally old friend, and his last work reminds us of both aspects of this fact. We perceive some signs of weariness in the agile hand. But we notice his last novel because it contains one fine idea, of which he has hardly made as much as he might. The father of the heroine is supposed to have died suddenly of heart disease, the truth being that he has been found at an inn with his throat cut. His daughter learns the facts of his death, when the story is half over, as far as they are known to any one, and thereby becomes the sharer in a much greater delusion than her first mistake as to matter of fact. Her mistake as to the facts of his death is unimportant; the mistake as to its whole character into which she is led by the knowledge of these facts is of vital consequence, and leads to another death. We could suggest to a young and vigorous novelist no more pregnant and dramatic theme than is here imperfectly and half-consciously worked out. That he who cannot reveal all, misleads when he reveals a part, is, to our mind, one of the lessons our age needs most to learn. Would that it might be laid to heart by the writers of other books than fiction!

The critic of fiction who had not to notice one of Mrs. Oliphant's novelst would indeed have lit on a remarkable hiatus in her inexhaustible activity. The least valuable production from her pen is better worth notice, as a resource to pass away an idle hour, than the greater part of what we have to notice here. Is the biographer of Edward Irving, the student of Dante, satisfied to have it said that one picks out the latest production as the surest provender for the invalid, the ignorant, the idle? At least, then, let her give us harmless, if she ceases to provide us with nourishing, fare. She seems to be quite aware that her stock has been somewhat exhausted by rapid production, and has tried to give flavour to one of her last works by an expedient which is quite unworthy of her. Sir Tom is a sheep in wolf's clothing. There is a continual hope of something pungent held out to those readers who, like the American girl described in that clever novel, "The Breadwinners," pounce on George Sand's novels as the works of "a corrupter of youth," and find "La petite Fadette" grievously disappointing. After hovering on the verge of impropriety for the best part of three volumes, this delightful descent is denied them, and they are drawn safely back into the realms of dull conjugal propriety and level virtue. Here the critic has a right to remonstrate. Paint a man's life as it is if you will; speak of its temptations with the earnestness and the solemnity they demand, and bring to bear whatever strength you possess against them; or else write for the young and the ignorant, and never suggest what you do not propose to unveil. To attempt to compromise between these ideals is to unite the evils of both. If schoolgirls are introduced to a woman whom they are taught to regard, during the greater part of three volumes, as the concealed * "I say No." By Wilkie Collins. 3 vols. Chatto & Windus. + "Sir Tom." By Mrs. Oliphant. 3 vols. Longmans & Co. Oliphant. 3 vols. Longmans & Co. VOL. XLVII.

3 E

Madam." By Mrs.

mistress of her host, it does not suddenly purify the atmosphere to tell them that all this was a mistake. If, on the other hand, the story is intended for mature eyes, why this much ado about nothing? We are quite aware that it will prove an appetizing stimulant to some readers, but not, we are sure, those whom a writer like Mrs. Oliphant wishes to attract to her books.

We must find space to name three novels, each worthy of lengthy notice for different reasons. "Ramona "* brings from the Far West and "The Poison Tree "+ from the Far East a picture of life affording the novel-reader a refreshing contrast to his daily fare, but both seem to us almost unbearably painful. We would entreat the author of "Ramona," in any further use of her unquestionable power, that she would wring our hearts less cruelly; life has pictures enough of the desolate and oppressed, of hard prosperity and crushed gentleness; let art keep her true function, and relieve the imagination by opening a vista through and beyond the darkness and failure of actual experience. "The Poison Tree" is a much less powerful novel, but as the work of a native Indian, and a combination of a vivid picture of Indian life, with a hint at that deep-rooted sense of the evil of desire which lies at the root of Indian philosophy, it has a no less keen interest, and we recommend both books heartily to all readers youthful enough not to dread tears. The pathos of "Mark Rutherford" is of a less painful kind. The sketch-we can hardly call it a story-is full of sadness, and yet relieved by a breath of hopefulness through all, and by a continual accompaniment of subtle and keen reflection that lights up the style with a sort of starlight illumination. It is evidently fiction, and yet the interest of an actual biography seems strangely woven in with it; it blends the attraction of a real self-revelation with that of a work of art. It is the sequel to the supposed autobiography of the hero, a Dissenting minister, and embodies, if it does not actually transcribe, an evidently real and intimate knowledge of some phases of the dumb struggle that goes on all around us, and that to the conventional judgment is associated with vulgarity. The reader of this little volume closes it with a profound sense of the pathos lying at the heart of all that is commonplace, the struggle, the pain, the yearnings, of that part of humanity in which there is nothing exceptional. Fiction, thus occupied, seems to us to have found its highest vocation. We are made to feel here, just as we do in life, that what we name commonplace is in fact merely the objective correlate of inattention, and that wherever the eye is taught to see there it disappears. We know no lesson that the writer of fiction may more profitably exert his skill to teach.

JULIA WEDGWOOD.

* Ramona." By Helen Jackson. 2 vols. Macmillan & Co. +"The Poison Tree." By Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Translated by Miriam S. Knight. 1 vol. T. Fisher Unwin.

Mark Rutherford's Deliverance." Edited by his Friend, Reuben Shapcott. 1 vol. Trübner & Co.

III.-GENERAL LITERATURE.

BIOGRAPHY.-The second volume of the "Dictionary of National Biography" has made its appearance with satisfactory expedition, and fully maintains the high quality of the first, and perhaps increases our confidence in the editor's skill in coping with the difficulties of his task. This volume carries the work down to the beginning of the letter B, and the most important articles it contains are a really interesting account of Anselm by Canon Stephens, and a careful and fair-minded biography of Bacon by Professor S. R. Gardiner, who thinks the importance of Bacon's political labours and ideas has not been sufficiently acknowledged. Mr. Leslie Stephen himself writes on Jane Austen and Madame D'Arblay, Mr. S. L. Lee (at disproportionate length) on Roger Ascham, Mr. Hutton on Walter Bagehot, Mr. C. F. Keary on Arthur, Mr. T. Walrond on Dr. Arnold. TRAVEL.-Major Johnson † may be able to tell a good story of travel, and sketch a very tolerable picture, but he is no scholar or archæologist. Considering this, he would have done well to pass over all account of Athens in his highly erratic notes from the Piræus to Pesth." His description possesses only the novelty of inaccuracy. Athene and Hephaestus are disguised as Minerva and Vulcan; repeated mention is made of the Temple of Jupiter Olympus (sic); the bronze statue of Athene Promachos is described as being of gold and silver -possibly by some confusion with the chryselephantine Parthenos; the word metope is wrongly derived, and the use of a plural voice in Greek entirely overlooked. In the Hippodrome at Constantinople the author saw the column of twisted serpents, which, as everybody knows, was set up in commemoration of the victory of Platææ, and supported a dedicatory tripod; this column, he casually asserts, "used to hold But the author's enthusiasm is the crudest the tripod of the oracle." part of him; in looking down upon Athens, he tells us that he "tried to realize" that he was "really on the ground where Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Alkæus, and Pindar had flourished; the thought," he adds, "was overwhelming." The author might really have spared himself the shock of imaginations so erroneous.-Mr. Augustus Hare's "Studies in Russia" is a kind of advanced guide-book to Russia, meant mainly to supply the tourist with fuller information than he will find in his Murray or Baedeker about the meaning and history of the objects of interest to which those handbooks direct his attention; but the work ought also to be useful and acceptable to the general reader. Mr. Hare's studies are not very deep or exhaustive, nor do they profess to be, but they touch on a great variety of subjects, and give on the whole a good popular idea of things, drawn from considerable reading and six months' observation in the country. The book is illustrated with sketches taken by the author on the spot, "under the fear," he says, "almost the certainty, of arrest."— *Edited by Leslie Stephen. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

+"On the Track of the Crescent." By Major E. C. Johnson, M. A.I., F.R. Hist. S. London: Hurst & Blackett.

London: Smith, Elder & Co.