especially the episode of Arbuton's hitting with his pebble the great beetling cliff, is pre-eminently graphic; and the pictures in and around Quebec,-of the quaint old town, with its broad prospect, narrow streets, and history-haunted environs, of the lichen-clad Chateau Bigot,-add, by their effective setting, to the interest of the brief romance. The story, in which the democratic, if not communistic, sympathies of the author are most apparent, is that of the premature engagement of an unsophisticated girl to a New England exquisite, happily prevented from resulting in an ill-assorted marriage by the timely betrayal of his inability or unwillingness to accept its consequences. Arbuton, “always making himself agreeable under protest," with "his cold, snubbing, putting-down ways," the "young iceberg," who is surprised into melting by the girl's beauty and grace, is one of the most consummate models of a highly-respectable and conscientious "prig" in modern fiction. He is both good and brave; but so unintentionally and habitually offensive that, after passing a week in his company, we should long for an hour with "Bill Sykes" or "Mr. Rochester." Kitty is bright and true, and by no means foolish in her frankness, but more slightly drawn. Fanny Ellison, a match-maker, who "would discover the tender passion in the eyes of a potato," but is by no means satisfied with her happily frustrated achievement, and her husband, the Colonel, wearing lightly his laurels from the Civil war, are true to nature but somewhat sketchy; while Uncle Jack stands in the background, among the oil wells of Erie Creek, like a warning shadow. The fine ladies from Boston, in whose presence Mr. Arbuton is ashamed of his rural fiancée, forcibly embody the insolence of provincial fashion. Nothing in the volume is more natural than the disenchanting effect of poor Kitty's honestly assumed country dress. Unconventionally, at the close the heroine is not paired off with some other fool, but is left with her future

THE "CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE"-"DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE." 399

unexplored a commendable variation to the jaded reader of modern novels. Mr. Howell's consular experiences, partially reproduced in his Venetian Life, are idealised in the Foregone Conclusion, a subtle and almost oppressively sad repetition of the recurring theme of aspiration mocked by reality. Don Ippolito's inventions, and his hopeless passion, take the place of the mad painter's Madonna. But amid much lively conversation, incident and caricature (as the portrait of Mrs. Vervain), the image of the forlorn sceptical monk and broken-down visionary alone keeps a place in our affection. Ferris is energetic and kindly, with a caustic tongue and good sense; but if his remarks at the tomb of his old rival mean, as he says, no harm, they exhibit little heart. His wife is softer, but equally practical. The shadows of the palace and the prison, on either side of the Bridge of Sighs, seem to darken the book. In Dr. Breen's Practice, on the other hand, we have the fresh breezes of New England. It is a pleasant tale of the adventures of a female doctor, happily free from the hardness of most American heroines, who, honestly struggling in her profession, is disgusted by the apathy of her own sex; and, in the end, is emancipated from her toils in a manner, frequent, as would appear, in those latitudes; for, in common with other girls in recent romances, after rejecting her lover, she ends by proposing to him, and is accepted. The story abounds in startling situations-as the dangers in the boat, etc.—in satirical or trenchant, though not always consistent, remarks, e.g.

"It's tremendous to think what men could accomplish for their sex, if they only hung together as women do." "Duty! I'm sick of duty! Let the other women who are trying to do something for themselves take care of themselves as men would. I don't owe

them more than a man would owe other men, and I won't be hoodwinked into thinking I do." "There is such a thing as having too much conscience, and of being stupified by it, so that you can't really see what is right." "Optimistic fatalism is the real religion of our orientalising West." "Mullridge's grandfather passed his declin

ing days in robust inebriety, and lived to cast a dying vote for General Jackson."

The sharpest antagonism of the book is against the Antihomœopathic intolerance of the medical craft. On woman's rights it gives an uncertain sound.

Mr. Howells is, like Mr. James, essentially a realist, with an excessive love, almost a craze, for analysis; but he has achieved his greatest success where he has ventured to tread on the edge of the two worlds of common life and mystery. The Undiscovered Country is not merely his masterpiece it is altogether deeper than his other work. The physical facts of Mesmerism have received more attention in America than in England; and the more supernatural claims of Clairvoyance obtain wider acceptance, even among men of knowledge and culture, not because Americans are more credulous than Englishmen, but because abnormal psychical phenomena are more frequent in their atmosphere, and, in graver matters, they are less restrained by fashion. Nowhere has the master-motive of so-called "Spiritualism" been so boldly set forth as in this strange tale. The leading character, more dupe than quack, imagines that he has found in its "manifestations" the one solid proof of a future state of existence; clings to this-as thousands of his countrymen at this moment really do-as the sole voucher of an immortality made inestimable by bereavement; and conceives himself entrusted with a mission to convert and comfort the world, otherwise lapsing into materialism. Dr. Boynton, from his first appearance, at the séance of the callous juggler, Mrs. Le Roy, to his heartrending failure, is consistently pathetic, but too readily acquiesces in the final disenchantment. This romance, which beats with such power at the iron gates of the unseen world, is excellent in scenery as in portraiture. The whole episode of the Shakers is well sus

1 I write in ignorance of A Modern Instance, which has just appeared.

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tained. The refuge of the forlorn itinerants with that quaint community reminds us of Una's dwelling with the "simple savage folk." Ford is a shrewdly-drawn picture of a cynic, endowed with some intellectual brilliancy and depth of feeling there is a touch of conventionality (redeemed by the half-humorous difficulties with the Shakers) in his marriage with Egeria. She is one of the fragile creatures whom we are charmed to find, still, of possible growth in the New England of Bostonia Victrix. But she is as like Priscilla as her father is unlike Westervelt.

The successors of Nathaniel Hawthorne are, consciously or unconsciously, living in his shade. In passing from the one to the other, we "wander down into a lower world," and find ourselves repeating, "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo." We return from the pupils to the master, as from the schools of Raphael to himself, or from Ben Jonson to Shakespeare.

CHAPTER XII.

AMERICAN HUMORISTS-CONCLUSION.

IT has been said that man is the only animal that laughs or weeps ; for he alone is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. Human life is presented under two phases: the serious, in which the mind contemplates events in a regular order; and the ludicrous, where this order is broken and the mind is subjected to a pleasant start. The former phase receives its literary adornment or interpretation from Fancy and Imagination: the latter from Wit and Humour. The two pairs are similarly related, and in both cases the dividing line between them is imperfectly ascertained. "Wit," says Isaac Barrow, in a passage, much of which may be applied to humour, “is a thing so versatile and multiform that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear notice thereof than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of fleeting air. Sometimes it lieth in allusion to a known story or saying, sometimes in forging an apposite tale. . . . It is lodged in a sly question or a smart answer, in a tart irony or hyperbole, in a plausable reconciling of contradictions, or in acute nonsense, in a counterfeit speech or mimic gesture." The distinction between the terms is partially indicated by their etymologies: the one pointing to intellectual insight and rapidity, the other to a constitutional peculiarity, based on a state of feeling