sion -the only trustworthy sign of a real terioration of conduct and character. His Mr. Dunster returns from a dinner-party with Mr. Wilkins to talk over some business matter; a disagreement arises and Wilkins strikes his adversary a sudden blow-a fatal blow. Down from her chamber comes Ellinor, and finds Dunster dead on the floor, of her father's study; and they two, at the suggestion and with the assistance of Dixon, Mr. Wilkens's factotum, bury the body in the flower garden. The police of Hamley do not appear to have been very shrewd detectives, for they and everybody else credit the first rumour explaining Dunster's disappearance—namely, that he has decamped to America with so much of his principal's private and professional property, that his affairs are thrown into irretrievable confusion. But the three who have conspired to conceal what was no crime-or, at the worst, manslaughter-have spoiled their lives utterly. Terrors assail them on every side; their home is become a haunted place, Ellinor loses her lover, Mr. Wilkins dies insolvent, and seventeen years after, when, in making a cutting for a railway, Dunster's body is discovered, Dixon is arrested and tried for murder. The old servant keeps counsel so far as to let himself be condemned to death, but Ellinor flies to the rescue, and things are so pleasantly arranged in the end for the survivors of the dark night's work, that it seems as if Dunster had been only rightly served for making himself disagreeable. It is true that their consciences have been irksome; but, for the public good, it has been found so essential to supplement the work of conscience with penal inflictions, that we feel troubled in our sense of justice when Mrs. Gaskell lets off assassins and their accessories without any pains and penalties beyond what looks most like the dread of being found out; for in this instance the torment of conscience does not lead to confes Shortly after the death of Charlotte Bronté in 1855, Mrs. Gaskell was requested to write the life of that gifted woman, and in the biography she produced, we have one of the fullest yet simplest and most touching records in our language a record known and popular wherever our language is spoken. She had a subject in which all the world could feel an interest—a woman possessed of the highest intellectual power, whose conscientiousness and family affection withstood every temptation which extraordinary literary success throws in the way of women; ambitious and world-famed, yet living and suffering obscurely; the moral of her life, the unconquerable strength of genius and goodness.' · Mrs. Gaskell's fine appreciation of scenery, especially of the wild, bleak hill-country of Yorkshire and Lancashire, enables her to set before us in vivid relief the moorland parsonage of Haworth, where Charlotte Bronté was born and died, where her great faculties found their nurture, and where all the love of her passionate heart was garnered up. The biography was almost universally accepted as tender, just, and true, and if it had appeared to some that the happy-tempered, genial, motherly writer did not get at the core of the recluse, all whose joys were spiritual, all her miseries physical and external, it may arise from the fact that their personal intimacy was not close, more than from the lack of sympathy. A biography, written so immediately on the death of its subject, risks many perils, and of these it cannot be said that Mrs. Gaskell steered quite clear even of the most obvious. Reading the book now; we are impressed with the intense pain and mortification it must have inflicted on living persons, and with the absence of the judicial spirit which would have discerned that there must be something to be said on the other side of those matters of fact of which we are shown but one. In later editions the defects arising from prejudice or from partiality have been abated; and coming to the story with a calm mind, after the lapse of ten years, we are not always so far influenced by Mrs. Gaskell's power of narrative that we cannot perceive primary causes other than those she sets forth to account for the family tragedy she has to record. We should ascribe to the needless privations and hardships of their early childhood, rather than to the neglects of Cowan Bridge, the foundation of that physical debility which marred the brief lives of all the Bronté girls, and to the absence of due paternal care and guidance in boyhood, the going astray of their unhappy brother. It is to be observed that in the selection made from Miss Bronte's letters, we have no word of causes, but only of consequences; that she lays no blame anywhere, and offers no plea in extenuation of the misconduct which made her home worse than a prison-house. Whether it was fair to reveal a half-truth with insinuations, where it was impossible to reveal the whole truth, is a matter for private rather than for critical opinion. In a literary point of view, we think the interest and reality of the life might have been retained with much less of painful reflection upon persons beyond the four walls of Haworth parsonage. But with all its over-statements or under-statements. the work undoubtedly remains what it was pronounced to be at the time of its publication, one of the best biographies of a woman by a woman,' that we possess. We come now to Mrs. Gaskell's novels in her last manner, SYLVIA'S LOVERS,' and 'WIVES AND Daughters,' with the exquisite short story of COUSIN PHILLIS' between. In SYLVIA'S LOVERS' we are carried back to the war-time at the end of the last century, and to Monkshaven, a town on the north-eastern coast, which a hundred delicate descriptive touches enable us to identify with Whitby. We are made as well acquainted with its amphibious population as with the operatives of Manchester, and Sylvia Robson, the bonnie only child of a man who was a little of a farmer, a little of a seaman, a little of a smugler, is as real to us in her joys and sorrows as Mary Barton, or any of the factory lasses with whom Mrs. Gaskell was personally familiar. She has the art of thoroughly clothing her concep tions in flesh and blood, of putting into their mouths articulate specch, individually appropriate, so that we are impressed by them and moved as by the doings and sufferings of men and women whom we have actually known. As we read, they are not fictitious characters to us, but persons whose sentiments, motives, conduct, we feel inclined to analyze and discuss as if they had a literal bearing upon our own. Sylvia Robson is a charming rustic lassie for a heroine, and is first introduced to us perplexed with the prettiest and most innocent of feminine vanities, the choice of a new cloak - shall it be scarlet, shall it be grey? Her young love for a bit of gorgeous colour inclines to scarlet, but her mother has spoken up for grey. She is on her road to Monkshaven, with Molly Corney, a neighbour's daughter, to sell her butter at the Market Cross, and by the way the girls debate the purchase which is to follow the sale of the butter. The girls were walking barefoot, and carrying their shoes and stockings in their hands during the first part of their way, but as they and turned aside along a foot-path that led were drawing near Monkshaven they stopped down from the main road to the banks of the Dee. There were great stones in the river about here, round which the waters gathered and eddied and formed deep pools. Molly sat down on the grassy bank to wash her feet, but Sylvia, more active (or perhaps lighter-hearted with the notion of the cloak in the distance), placed her basket on a gravelly bit of shore, and giving a long spring, seated herself on a stone almost in the middle of the stream. Then she began dipping her little rosy toes in the cool rushing water and whisking them out with childish glee. "Be quiet wi' the', Sylvia. Thou'st splashing me all over, and my feyther'll noane be so keen o' giving me a new cloak as thine is seemingly." 'Sylvia was quiet, not to say penitent, in a moment. She drew up her feet instantly, and, as if to take herself out of temptation, she turned away from Molly to that side of her stony seat on which the current ran shallow and broken by pebbles. But once disturbed in her play, her thoughts reverted to the great subject of her cloak. She was now as still as a minute before she had been full of gambolling life. She had tucked herself up on the stone as if it had been a cushion, and she a little Sultana. Molly was deliberately washing her feet and drawing on her stockings, when she heard a sudden sigh, and her companion turned round so as to face her, and said, "I wish mother had'nt spoken for t' grey." up 66 6 Why, Sylvia, thou wert saying as we topped t brow, as she did nought but bid thee think twice afore settling on scarlet." 666 to hewn stone. Ay! but mother's words are scarce, and weigh heavy. Feyther's liker me, and we talk a deal of rubble; but mother's words are liker She puts a deal o' meaning in 'em. And then," said Sylvia, as if she was put Philip for his opinion. I hate a man as has out by the suggestion, "she bid me ask Cousin gotten an opinion on such-like things." 666 Well! we shall never get to Monkshaven this day, either for to sell our stuff and eggs, or to buy thy cloak, if we're sitting here much longer. T'sun's for slanting low, so come along lass, and let's be going! But if I put on my stockings and shoon here, and jump back into von wet gravet, I'se not be fit to be seen," said Sylvia, in a pathet ic tone of bewilderment, funnily child-like. She stood up, her bare feet curved round the curving surface of the stone, her slight figure balancing as if in the act to spring. "Thou knows thou'll just have to jump back barefoot, and wash thy feet afresh, without A great event in Monkshaven - the coming into port of the Resolution, the first whaler of the season, from the Greenland seas delays the purchase of the cloak, but it is accomplished at last, and scarlet wins the day, in spite of the advice of the shopman that Cousin Philip, in Sylvia's contemptuous dislike of whom we feel inclined to sympathize, from the moment we hear that he was a serious young man, tall, but with a slight stoop in his shoulders, and a long upper lip, which gave a disagreeable aspect to a face that might otherwise have been good-looking. Sylvia's sweet warm-heartedness and sympathy are beautifully brought out in the events that ensue on the arrival of the whaler, down upon whose newly returned men -husbands, fathers, sons, lovers - pounces the press-gang. These legalized kidnappers furnish the tragedy of the story, which needs all the bright pictures strewn along its pages to lighten and relieve the everdeepening gloom of the back-ground. Sylvia's lovers are her cousin Philip Hepburn, and Charley Kinraid, specksioneer to the whaling-ship Good Fortune, who has made himself a hero in other eyes than hers by his gallantry in resisting the press-gang, in the course of which resistance he received a severe wound. He is carried to Moss Brow, nursed into health and strength again, and during this process it is that he and Sylvia grow into love with each other. Philip prosecutes his suit by teaching Sylvia to read and write against her inclination, and by insinuating evil stories against his rival a method of courtship which fails as it deserves to fail, while Kinraid's prospers without an effort. The girl's aversion to the young draper, who is so pious, proper. and demure that everybody else approves of him, is a just instinct. He sees the pressgang lurking in ambush for Kinraid, has the chance of warning him, and does not do it; he sees the luckless fellow caught and carried of to a man-o-war's boat; he even accepts a message from him to give to Sylvia Tell her I'll come back to her. Bid her not forget the great oath we took together this morning; she's as much my wife as if we'd gone to church; I'll come back and marry her afore long.' But when he hears that the specksioneer is supposed to have been overtaken by the tide and drowned on the shore, because his hat has been found drenched with sea water, he holds his peace, and lets Sylvia with the rest, though he sees her grieving all the day long, believe her lover dead. "When sorrows come, they come not sinDaniel gle spies but whole battalions.' Robson gets into a fight with the press-gang to release some seamen whom they have captured very treacherously; an officer is killed, and Robson being brought to trial, as leader of the fray in which the disaster occurred, is condemned ahd executed. The forlornness of his widow and poor Sylvia makes Philip Hepburn's opportunity. He can give them protection and a good home, and for her mother's sake Sylvia consents to marry him- her heart yearning all the time with tenderest regret for Kinraid. There is an affecting scene within twentyfour hours after their engagement where she betrays this, and bespeaks Philip's patience. 'Sylvia sat down on the edge of the trough, and dipped her hot little hand in the water. Then she went in quickly, and lifting her beautiful eyes to Philip's face, with a look of inquiry "Kester thinks as Charlie Kinraid may have been took by the press-gang." 'It was the first time she had named the name of her former lover to her present one since the day, long ago now, when they had fushed her all over; but her sweet trustful eyes quarrelled about him; and the rosy colour never flinched from their steady unconscious gaze. Philip's heart stopped beating; literally, as if he had come to a sudden precipice, while he had thought himself securely walking on sunny greensward. He went purple all over from dismay; he dared not take his eyes away from that sad earnest look of hers, but he was drew a veil before his brain. He heard his own voice saying words he did not seem to have framed in his own mind. thankful that a mist came before them and a "Kester's a d-d fool," he growled. "He say's there s mebbe but one chance in hundred," said Sylvia, pleading, as it were, Kester; "but oh, Philip, think ye there's just that one chance?" for chance, I Ay, there's a chance, sure enough," said Philip, in a kind of fierce despair that made him reckless what he said and did. There's a have not seen with our own eyes as it may not suppose, for everything i' life as we ha' happened. Kester may say next as there is a chance your father is not dead, because we none on us saw him "Hung," he was going to have said, but a touch of humanity came back into his stony heart. Sylvia sent up a little sharp cry at his words. He longed at the sound to take her in his arms and hush her up, as a mother hushes her weeping child. But the very longing, having to be repressed, only made him more beside himself with guilt, anxiety and rage. They were quite still now. Sylvia looking sadly down into the bubbling, merry, flowing water; Philip glaring at her, wishing that the next word were spoken, though it might stab him to the heart. But she did not speak. said, "thou sets a deal o' store on that man, At length, unable to bear it any longer, he Sylvia." If" that man" had been there at that mo ment, Philip would have grappled with him, and not let go his hold till one or the other were dead. Sylvia caught some of the passionate meaning of the gloomy miserable tone of Philip's voice as he said these words. She looked up at him. "I thought yo' knowed that I cared a deal for him." There was something so pleading and innocent in her pale troubled face, so pathetic in her tone, that Philip's anger, which had been excited against her as well as against all the rest of the world, melted away into love; and once more he felt that have her for his own he must at any cost. He sat down by her, and spoke to her in quite a different manner to that which he had used before, with a ready tact and art which some strong instinct or tempter close at his ear supplied. "Yes, darling, I know yo' cared for him. I'll not say ill of him that is dead-ay, dead and drowned whatever Kester may say-before now; but if I chose I could tell tales." "No! tell no tales; I will not hear them," said she, wrenching herself out of Philip's clasping arm. "They may misca' him forever' and I'll not believe them." A few days later, when Philip comes entreating her forgiveness for a starving wretch whom her father had succoured to the saving of his life, and whose evidence had hanged his benefactor, she turns round on him furious. "I've a mind to break it off for iver wi' thee, Philip. Thee and me was never meant to go together. When I love, I love, and when I hate, I hate; and him as has done harm to me, to mine, I may keep fra striking, fra murdering, but I'll niver forgive!" They are married, a child is born to them, and soon after Kinraid re-appears, and all Philip's baseness is laid open to his wife, who makes a vow in her wrath, never to hold Philip for her lawful husband again, nor ever to forgive him for the evil he had wrought her, but to hold him as a stranger, and one who had done her heavy wrong. How God takes her at her word, and suffers no peacemaker to intervene but death, is the rest of this pathetic story beautiful as true. -as true as it is pathetic, and as sorrows; we 'COUSIN PHILLIS' is less remarkable for story than for consummate grace and delicacy of execution. Here we escape the shock of soul-destroying breathe sweet country air amongst good people who live above the temptations of an evil world; people to whom God has days, rising with a prayer, lying down with given neither riches nor poverty, but a full a blessing. The characters are few but instinct with vigour and action. First there is the teller of the tale-Paul Manning, an engineer, married, middle-aged — who gives it as a beautiful sad memory of his prentice youth, when he lodged in a little three-cornered room over a pastry-cook's shop in the market-place of the county town of Eltham, and had for his master a far-travelled, clever fellow named Holdsworth, whose talk was like 'dram-drinking,' and himself one of the most loveable and delightful of men. Then there is the family at Hope Farm -Minister Holman, his wife and their daughter, the Cousin Phillis of the story, a stately, gracious young woman, in the dress and with the simplicity of a child.' So young Manning thinks when he sees her on his first visit to the farm, and finds her father in the fields at the end of the day's harvest work, closing it with a psalm, Come all harmonious tongues,' sung to Mount Ephraim' tune. It is a lovely picture. measure of content; who live laborious The two labourers seemed to know both Phillis: her rich voice followed her father's as words and music, though I did not; and so did he set the tune; and the men came in with more uncertainty, but yet harmoniously. Phillis looked at me once or twice with a little surprise at my silence; but I did not know the words. There we five stood, bareheaded, excepting Phillis, in the tawny stubble-field, from which all the shocks of corn had not yet been carried - a dark wood on one side, where the woodpigeons were cooing; blue distance seen through the ash trees on the other.' We might multiply citations of such tender, suggestive scenes, for the whole story is a series of them, but we will refrain. Cousin Phillis goes through a great sorrow, but God will not suffer her heart to be broken, and everybody tries to console her. The farm-servant Betty-one of Mrs. Gaskell's typical rough, sweet-natured creatures -gives her some excellent advice when she mind us of nothing so much as those frantic sees her in tears. "Now, Phillis," said she, coming up to the sofa, we ha' done a' we can for you, and th' doctors has done a' they can for you, and I think the Lord has done a' He can for you, and more than you deserve, too, if you don't do something for yourself. If I were you, I'd rise up and snuff the moon, sooner than break your father's and mother's hearts wi' watching and waiting till it pleases you to fight your own way back to cheerfulness. There, I never favoured long preachings, and I have said my say." A day or two after Phillis asked me, when we were alone, "If I thought my father and mother would allow her to go and stay with them a couple of months." She blushed a little as she faltered out her wish for change of thought and scene. "Only for a short time, Paul. Then we will go back to the peace of the old days. I know we shall; I can, and I will." With 'WIVES AND DAUGHTERS' we shall bring our reviewal of Mrs. Gaskell's works to a close. It was the last of them. She had but one chapter to write when death arrested her cunning hand, and the tale was left unfinished though not so incomplete but that we can discern how happily it would have ended had she been spared to work it out. In this story of every-day life her literary art attained its highest excellence. The moral atmosphere is sweet, bracing, and invigorating; the human feeling good and kind throughout. We do not hesitate to pronounce it the finest of Mrs. Gaskell's productions; that in which her true womanly nature is most adequately reflected, and that which will keep her name longest in remembrance. This generation has produced many writers whose books may live long after them as pictures of manners in the reign of good Queen Victoria; but we call to mind none save Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Dickens, George Eliot, and Mr. Anthony Trollope, in their best moments, to whom the future will be so much indebted for its knowledge of how we lived and moved in the middle of the nineteenth century as to Mrs. Gaskell. As for the tribe of authors to whom the catch-penny nickname of Sensation Novelists' is indiscriminately applied (let them be never so dull), we make little account of their chance of enduring reputation. Their figures are out of drawing, their accessories are out of keeping; antic gestures stand for passions, blotches of red and black paint for colour. The majority of their works re essays at art which throng the walls of the Pantheon Bazaar, or delight young men and women from the country in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Wax-Work Show. They are a fashion-like enamelled faces, dyed hair, hoop-petticoats and chignons. They have their admirers, people who, like themselves, never went, save in imagination, across any threshold in Belgravia, but who are flattered in the notion that they have a monopoly of all the virtues and graces, while the vices and furies reign exclusively amongst the nobility and gentry. Miss Braddon, herself to us, in her novel of The Doctor's Wife,' an adept in sensation-writing, has revealed the secrets of their workmanship, and has told us that they have been promoted from the ranks of the cheap low-class magazines, which were quite unknown to Mr. Mudie's library and polite readers a dozen years ago. We can believe it on her authority, and we shall not be sorry when the rage for them in society dies out; for though we feel sure that good household morality, such as the authors of John Halifax' and the Chronicles of Carlingford' supply us with, is more widely read and approved than these florid romances, the latter do attract many readers, and spoil their taste for what is better. We cannot, for instance, imagine any one enchanted with the adventures of Lady Audley and Miss Gwilt turning with relish to Mrs. Gaskell's WIVES AND DAUGHTERS.' Sweet Molly Gibson, loyal, unselfish, duty-loving, duty-doing, would seem, by comparison, a mere bread-andbutter miss. Cynthia, the incarnation of a flirt, who cannot help charming, who changes her lovers as easily as her gloves, who subsides into successful matrimony without any obliteration of her spots, or any change of her disposition, would suggest only lost opportunities for blood-and-thunder' writing. Those who could study the passion of Mr. Bashwood without sick-loathing of heart, would find no delight in the company of Mr. Gibson and of Squire Hamley and his sons. And yet what excellent company it is! how purifying, how vivifying! We may cite again here, with special force, the dictum of the old French court-moralist and philosopher with which we began our article. As we read this every-day story, our minds are raised, noble sentiments inspire us, we know we are receiving benefit, and we seek no other rule for judging the work; it is good, and done by the hand of a workman. |