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and bores all the jockeys with Magyar, every thing is in an allegorical fog, which, in the prosy and tiresome appendix, turns into good, ribald, newspaper English prose, fired at every thing and every one. Mr. Borrow began by eccentric, most amusing, missionary travels in Spain, devoted to gipsy-taming, horse-riding, and Bible-distributing. He followed up his dark sayings with an able, doubtful, and sometimes coarse work on gipsy manners and traditions, which might have come from the author of "De Lunatico Inquirendo." Next came his robust, murky novel, and now these four volumes of angry, self-assertion, storyless, brideless, almost witless. Vexed critics, feeling hurt, begin, therefore, now to pick themselves up, and boldly assert that Mr. Borrow does not know Sanscrit, is a smattering linguist, is a blatant, noisy, bullying Ishmaelite, whose gipsy talk is mere gibberish. Will no dweller by the green banks rise to defend him?

Our female novels gradually group themselves now in our review. There is not a publisher now but begins to believe-not from politeness, but from his ledger--that women are not very bad writers of novels. Miss Mulock's success with "John Halifax, Gentleman," drives this unreflecting, narrow-minded race of beings into the serious belief (for they never judge by any thing but the last success), that women will only read women's novels. They tell you so with protruded lips, and serious, dreamy, bilious eyes. This is their absurd, beggarly argument. Women are the chief readers of novels. They do not want story or adventure, dash, colour, or power. They want woman's feelings anatomized, explained, as women only fancy they can explain them (seeing one side of them pretty closely). They want men's thoughts, and hopes, and sorrows, too, regarded from the women's tender, sensitive, indoors, unreal, pleasant point of view. Women, being for the most part, indoor, idle, and at the same time, craving the sal volatile of intellectual excitement (having no great field for thought or action out of the world of feeling) keep, in London alone, some thousand small, buttoned boys daily going to and fro from Mudie's to Belgravia. At cushioned windows, in downy carriages, on scented sofas, on eastern ottomans, they sit and

drink in the dream of the novelthank God, a healthier and pleasanter food than it used to be !-so healthy, indeed, and tonic sometimes as to be almost as medicinal as a sermon.

Now, no one venerates the thoughtful heart of women more than we do; the electric instinct that, compared to man's heavy, slow-moving, reasoning power, seems almost godlike and unerring; but still we must deny (putting aside the unmeaningness of polite forms) that woman, whatever triumphs of domestic art she may attain, can ever achieve the first place even in the novel. The world has been spinning, we must all remember, some thousand years, to our certain knowledge, and yet millions of good mothers, and wives, and sisters as there have been, there has appeared no female discoverer of starry secrets, no female Shakspeare, no female Milton, no female Plato; and, therefore, from our past experience, we make bold to say, there will never be a female Cervantes, Le Sage, Fielding, Scott, or Dickens. We shall have grave pictures, interiors pink and white, heroes, heart-breakings; but no Raphael or Michel Angelo. The physical system of women would not bear such a strain of the brain. They have not the insight, they never can have the grasp. They do not know life, because the parlour is not life; they do not know the poor or the wretched. They do not mix in our police-courts, gambling-houses, camps, cabins, and such places, where man's life, in the more eventful aspects, is passed. They travel only along the beaten way; they share in few adventures; they do not rough it; they do not suffer enough; they live in hothouses, glazed and scented; they judge of how man treats man, by how man treats woman; they think they know how man feels, and they only know how woman feels they live in a small walled-in world; they know little of the glitter of fame and wealth; they have few misers, few conquerors, among them; they have griefs, but they are not tempted as we are; they may write domestic poems, but they will never write classic novels. Now on this text, take as a comment S. C. Hall's "Woman's Story" (Hurst and Blackett), a clever, poetical, strong-minded, mature woman's novel, eminently unreal, and almost impossible, yet plea

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sant reading, and worth eating up to the very rind, though occasionally mouthy and diffuse. In the first place, it is spoiled by being told by a third person-a nobody; a shadowy, characterless friend of Mr. Lyndsay's family-a great observer, as unlike the authoress we started with as needs be. Now this is all nonsense: your quiet nobodies are dull nonentities; your real note-taking mental spies are soon discovered, not to be treated in that sort of family way which is only another phrase for selfish indifference and neglect. The fact of this writer being a nobody is insisted upon with pertinacity by Mrs. Hall, the more and more foolish and improbable it appears; she rubs and rubs till the spot will break out on the skin. Had she told the story in her own omnipresent person, all this rude machinery might have been got rid of.

Mr. and Mrs. Lyndsay reside near the Fir-grove, "on the broad bold heath of Hampstead," (is the poet of Killarney growing quite Cockney?) The writer gloats on the deep grey shadowy common of Finchley, near London, mighty L., "gorging the vale of the sweeping Thames with masts and palaces. Mr. Lyndsay is narrow-minded, morose, and mysterious. Mrs. Lyndsay is a "snappish, fidgetty little woman," always finding fault with somebody. Mr. Lyndsay dresses badly, and is subject to sudden mental spasms, evidently implying some early misdeed that is to clear up. He has an Irish groom, one Jerry, fond of the family, disposed, without provocation, to tell family broils, and drone about his horses. Unexpectedly this illtempered, wrong-headed, Mrs. Lyndsay becomes the mother of a girl, whom she pampers, pets, and spoils. Then comes a sketch, in loose watercolours, of a sea-side village, on the Sussex coast, near Arundel Castle; or, as Mrs. Hall would say, "the stately castle of Arundel." Nobody and Helen (the child) go on a visit there to the Middletons, Mrs. Lyndsay's relations. Mrs. Middleton is the perfect, saintly, Christian lady. The daughter, Florence, is perfection-the foil of Helen, the dark poetess, the proud, the wilful, the intractable. Helen is imaginative; is roused by the ballads of one Mary Ryland, a cripple mantuamaker, who stands out white and pale

against the gaudy-coloured old maids. and gossiping majors of Hampstead, some thirty years ago. The Lyndsays' firm breaks, and there is a disagreeable frantic scene with the foolish, wrong-headed Mrs. Lyndsay, who had set her mind on Helen's "cutting out" her rival, Florence, her saintly cousin. Lyndsay, who appeared a fool, turns up a brave, honest man, and pays twenty shillings in the pound. Jerry is turned off. Things, however, get worse and worse, and the selfish wife, petulant and tormenting, determines to leave her husband, who is driven by her violence into a fit (a wellwritten scene). Helen, the impressive, stays with her sorely-wounded father; the mother packs up the china and limoges, and departs. Perpetual bickering had hardened her naturally unfeeling nature into brutality.

The mother and daughter suddenly leave Hampstead stealthily, and are lost sight of. Helen eventually turns up as a rising poetess of the day, giving an opportunity to Mrs. Hall to say many smart, stinging things of literary people, and to sketch some celebrities, while a suspicious Mr. Marley has fallen in love with Florence. Nobody meets Helen again. She has now sculptured marble hands, and a finely-moulded throat.

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Helen has determined to pay off her old father's debts, to prove that the mind has no sex, to snub man, and earn the immortality which follows literary success. must yet endure many more storms and bitter hail blasts of grief and affliction. From the first, however, there is a flaw in the diamond. Intolerable pride drives her scornfully to receive the praises of great people, who look upon art and such things secretly as only a superior sort of dancing-dogism. She becomes the lion of a season; the centre of all eyes-the core of the restless no-whither world; the Queen Solomon that all the foolish virgins and fuzzy queens of Sheba of a jammed, hot, elbowing soiree, nudge and strain to see. Liontaming missionaries, heroes who have surrendered cities, heroes who have taken them after some years labour, and other London padded, lisping Herculeses of the club, ogle or flatter her. So far so good. There is here moral purpose, or rather morals without much purpose, and good careful writing by

a lady who has seen literary society, and can describe it. The bad training of a genius by a mysterious, quiescent father, and a vulgar, silly mother, is brought out with pathos, and due attention to hits. We see Helen growing up into no belief in any standard of truth. She has grown blind to all difference between black and white. She acts no longer from principle, but from passion. Her trials and final electrical return to goodness are mixed up with smart sketches of the oddities of Irish serving people; glimpses of literary people, Wordsworth, egotistic, L. E. L. seen only by us for a moment, as a lightning flash, and other less names-some rather maliciously clever caricatures. The vulgar Mrs. Major Cobbleton is amusing and hearty; and as for Jerry, the Irish servant, when he flings himself down with his link before Helen's carriage at the opera door, or when he tells long yarns about "the troubles," and how he was hung and cut down, we like him because he is faithful, enthusiastic, and himself.

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Mrs. Hall has strong words for things she dislikes, and gives her feelings about such dislikes, thinking them arguments; and they are just as good. "At clubs," says our authoress, 'men indulge in selfish luxuries beyond their means; there they go to meet their friends; there they go to drink or play." Such is a specimen of her objections. Indeed she puts in that proud female Ishmael's (Helen's) mouth some very bitter words, true as they are stinging. She is hard upon white lies and absolution. It is a strong scene where that mysterious man of evil, Marley, who revenges himself on Helen for her father having deceived his mother by a false marriage; he is, in fact, Mrs. Lyndsay's natural son; throws his toils around his wretched sister to induce her to help him to marry Florence, threatening her if she discloses his real position to unmask her, and prevent her marriage with the son of a proud woman of rank. This knot and complication, though melodramatic, is grand at the moment of the dreadful struggle, when Marley threatens if Helen does not give him sign and agreement, to deprive her of her husband, to drive her successful play from the stage, and make her a stained outcast for ever. Helen is

ready for any sacrifice but of her love. She is struggling between the hands of the good spirit and claws of the angel when Jerry rushes in, announces the arrival of two policemen for Marley, who runs to the window, and breaks through, and escapes. Helen is saved. There is great pathos in the way, the victory once wonthe terrible victory over pride and self once won-how the repentant poetess the genius-delights to abase herself, and own her guilt and shame before Florence's father, before the proud, aristocratic mother and her aristocratic lover. She scourges her delicate skin with sharp thongs in bitter wailing penitence. She traces back the growth of the great sin of her life; and with heart purified, she emerges from the fiery path wiser and better. Her self-reliance grows more human and loving-she who had said that she would rather be sacrificed or pent up in a cage than pitied becomes elevated by faith, and that is the moral of the book. Need we relate the end of the story. Marley turns out to have been arrested for forgery, and, after the manner of all novel villains, poisons himself to save the jury trouble. Helen, too, turns out, after all, legitimate; for Marley's mother, before her intrigue with Mr. Lyndsay, appears to have been married. Jerry, of course, is pensioned, and Helen turns out a clever old maid and celebrated authoress, famous for standing up for the truth at all hazards and at all times. The last we see of our friends of the novel is (we really get interested, in spite of some fantasies) in an appropriate tableau on the sward in front of the Brighton esplanade, on a lovely day in August. Soft-hearted women love to see things comfortable and happy at last. There is Mr. Middleton, with his hand on a bath-chair containing Florence, still broken in health, but slowly convalescent. By her side walks Helen, busying herself kindly with the invalid's shawl. We hope we are mistaken in fancying we see in this work a sort of laudator temporis acti passing over our authoress. She derides modern improvement societies, "that would as soon pull down a cathedral as look at it." She is indignant at fast young men and girls who call their fathers "gover

nors." She is a strong-minded woman, who feels about their grievances. Her blow here is such a clean-cutting one that we must example it for Aurora Leigh's benefit.

"So busied is the particular sect about real or imaginary grievances so eager to overturn the laws of God, and to make a new position for themselves so busy about certain ‘rights' as to become quite oblivious of certain duties; in fact, strange as it may seem, they desire to be considered men in all things except their responsibilities. I have, not, however, heard how they intend to dispose of the marital question, or the duties of maternity."

Well put in, Mrs. Hall! Straight from the shoulder-good nervous hitting, enough to knock any strongminded woman out of the [wedding] ring.

The usual want of organizationground-plan and scaffold-making-is, however, wanting, in no small degree, to the full success of Mrs. Hall's clever Anglo-Irish story. Many of the cleverest thoughts seem after-thoughts, and are shaped out suddenly and fitfully. Marley is a mere black shadow -a purposeless villain, with no reason in his madness; and what is worst of all, the turning point in Helen's life-her consent, from mistaken and guilty pride, to his schemes upon Florence's affections and fortune is told in a weak way, long after it has happened-a most reprehensible practice, a feeble distortion, a fault like the Greek mode of relating, instead of acting, the catastrophe. There is a strong imagination that, while it preserves truth to itself— what painters call breadth, local colour, and harmony-makes strange things appear real. The Woman Story, it is no story to say, is worth reading. Mrs. Hall's story is a preRaphaelite domestic picture, with its nervous spasms, and situations of love, and guilt, and repentance, enforced upon us by the adjunct of carefullypainted carpets. You can see the red and the cords, the squares and the yellow.

Now we have "Freida the Jongléur," by Barbara Hemphill,* author of "Lionel Deerhurst," which is quite

in the old plate-armour style, but yet has much merits, and is interesting, because its unrealities and impossibilities are softened and mellowed by the light of a powerful imagination. It does not begin very promisingly with its murky, Maclise sort of villain, Charles de Valois. It begins not after the Miss Bronte familiar style of Riverston-"I had been a fortnight in London ;" or James's, "One morning in December, two horsemen might have been descried;" but like an historical essay, "Towards the close of the thirteenth century, Charles Count de Valois repaired to Munich, in pursuance of some political treaties which Philip le Bel.' Nor do we much warm at the meeting of the "hero of many a hard-fought battle" with the hazel-eyed Roman Juno, Beatrix Visconti; nor is the flight of Beatrix with the handsome Knight Templar much more exciting than the dull propriety of one of Sir Charles Eastlake's academic pictures. The final sacrifice that burnt up the voluptuous order of errant knights, Mrs. Hemphill deliberately assigns to this elopement, believing more than we do in hidden and causeless events, rather than in long lines of progress, or sequences, such as history now points to. The author mixes up with Freida the Saxon Jongleur, the Pagan, the itinerant Fanny Ellsler of the Richardsons of that day. We need scarcely say that she appears in drawers of white Persian silk, clasped by elastic gold armlets, or that over those bewitching drawers comes a robe of the azure silk of Damascus.

Freida the Jongléur is a shadowy, incoherent, black and white business

always animated, sometimes amusing, but never sound, natural, or true. The figures are of the royal Madame Tussaud school: their robes are tinselled; they move by clock-work jerks; and they are full, we are quite sure, not of blood, but of sawdust.

About that incoherent newspaperreport sort of novel, "Howard Plunkett," by Kinahan Cornwallis, the less, we think, we say, the better. Shipwrecks, houses of correction, paracides, end with the hero coming suddenly heir of the Bandum estates

*We lament to say that since the above critique was written the talented Irish author of Freida the Jongléur" has deceased.

(part of the scene is in Wicklow), and going in triumph into Kinsale Castle with his bride. A worse mixture of New York, Ireland, and Australia, we never met with.

"Cuthbert St. Elme; or, Passages in the Life of a Politician" (Hurst and Blackett), after this, is like passing from the rush of a boxing-night pit into the sweet air of a Belgravian drawing-room. The characters are real and probable-not crowded and vulgar-dramatic, distinct, and thoroughly made out. The writing arises occasionally to epigram, as when a small diplomatist's mind is said to be a succession of pigeon-holes, or when a crafty man's laugh is described as a mixture of the dog's and hyena's. The young peer and the literary adventurer are well contrasted-the sinful beauty and the pretty heroine, the mysterious Russian and the selfish politician, are all tinted from life, rather than inventions. The book is slightly written, but is full of smart, fashionable sketches, which pass before you like magic-lantern slides. There is no great prophetic foresight in the thoughts or opinions -no foretelling of change; the poor are hidden away behind the silk curtains; the quotations are stale French ones-effete. There is not much heart; there is a great deal too much of the old zoco co metaphor.

"He gazed through the long arcade of life. All seemed straight and smooth before him; but ages succeeded ages, through the gloomy passages. The way brightened, and he knew not where the light should glimmer."

But we must close our article by a notice of Lady Ponsonby's successful novel, "The Two Brothers." This lady has the artist power of constructing a

story. She interests and holds you; she instructs as much as she amuses. She describes truthfully and transparently, and writes pure sound English. She has poetry wit sparkles at her command. Her sentiment is genuine, earnest, and powerful; she does not try to mix scent with God's maydew. She writes with finish, completeness, and unity; she sees clearly, and describes what she sees; she has no screaming passion about her; nor do her characters bellow or go mad. short, in all they do and say there is a quiet, gentle tone.

In

As we are about to rise from our table, a green book, covered with gilding, catches our eye: it is a reprint of poor Gerald Griffin's "Tales of a Jury Room,"-stories supposed to be overheard by an inquisitive stranger, who has accidentally got locked up with a refractory jury. Some of them are rather dull, others run over with the real mountain dew of redundant Arabian-Irish fancy. They excel in freshness, but are loose and free in style.

66 'Halloa! what are these books there?"

"If you please, sir, a basketful of novels from Grafton-street for reviewing. I think the porter as brought them was swearing like a trooper, because they are so heavy."

"Very well (sighs), that will do." What have we here: "Cream; or, the Autobiography of a Thief" (it should be plagiarist), by Charles Reade. A sketchy, audacious failure, with a bad tone. "Wild Oats," by Captain Wraxall. A Bohemian novel, rough, but amusing.

But the dreadful word "finis" comes down on us like a chopper, and we shut up our desk.

THE STATE OF DONEGAL-GWEEDORE AND CLOUGHANEELY.

WITHIN the last twelve months public attention has been a good deal directed to the condition of a part of Ireland previously but little known, and we now propose to present our readers with a brief outline of those occurrences which have made famous the wilds of Gweedore and Cloughaneely. And the subject is an important one; for in this obscure corner of Ireland a flame is being kindled which will, if unextinguished, spread

far and wide, and shake the rights of property, if not defy the power of British law.

The districts of Cloughaneely and Gweedore are situated in the northwestern part of the county Donegal. They include the two parishes of Raymunterdony and Tullaghobegly, and comprise more than 80,000 acres. The total number of inhabitants is about 9,000. The ocean extends along the whole of the north side of these dis

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