the performance of domestic duties and the uous salve, a necessary reservation, which most accredited of all good works. The does not seem to us to mean much. Any moral proper of her stories may be good or woman plodding in good works as Olivia bad; as thus,-Lady Audley is wicked, and does, would produce a shudder and revulsion comes to a bad end; Aurora Floyd does a in such a mind, be she ever so earnest and hundred bad things and prospers in spite of sincere in her task. And to those outside them, both in her own fate and in the read- we grant this sort of life does seem a dull er's favor; but the real influence of every-one. Miss Braddon, no doubt, finds abunthing this lady writes is to depreciate cus- dance of young readers to echo her sentiment, tom, and steady work of any kind whatever; though habit coming upon a sense of usefulevery action, however creditable, that is not ness makes such lives more than tolerable, the immediate result of generous impulse. the happiest of all lives to those that live She disbelieves in systematic formal habitual them. In fact, Olivia represents the "moral goodness. She owns to a hatred of monoto- man" as familiar to us under the handling nous habit even in doing right. She declares of a certain class of preachers, saying prayers, for what she calls a Bohemian existence. reading the Bible, going three times a day She likes people to be influenced by anything to church :— rather than principle and cold duty; in fact, "Mrs. Marchmont made an effort to take nerves, feeling, excitement, will, and inclina- up her old life, with its dull round of ceasetion are the sole motive powers of every less duty, its perpetual self-denial. If she character she cares for. The person who had been a Roman Catholic she would have goes on day after day doing stated duty-work gone to the nearest convent, and prayed to because it is duty, not because she likes it, be permitted to take such vows as might

is

a monster to her, a something hardly human. She regards such an one (that is in her books) as a painful, oppressive phenomenon. Not believing in the pleasures of habit of any sort, she can no more understand that there may be alleviations, hopes, nay positive joys, in a life of conscientious observances than could Timothy's Bess, in "Adam Bede,” conceive it possible for life to have a single satisfaction to a person who wore such a cap as Dinah's. The recoil from dulness is evidently too strong, and all regularity, all day by day uniform occupation is dull to her; and she has such a way of putting it that we confess there is danger of its seeming dull to the reader also.

soonest set a barrier between herself and the

As it

world; she would have spent the long weary
days in perpetual ceaseless prayer; she would
have worn deeper indentations upon the stones
already hollowed by faithful knees.
was she made a routine of penance for her-
self, after her fashion; going long distances
on foot to visit her poor when she ought to
have ridden in her carriage; courting expos-
ure to rain and foul weather; wearing her-
self out with unnecessary fatigue, and re-
turning footsore to her desolate home, to fall
fainting in the strong arms of her grim at-
tendant Barbara. But this self-appointed
penance could not shut Edward Arundel and
Mary Marchmont from the widow's mind.
Walking through a fiery furnace, their im-
ages would have haunted her still, vivid and
palpable, even in the agony of death. . .
No good whatever seemed to come of her en-
deavors, and the devils, who rejoiced at her
weakness and her failure, claimed her as their
own. They claimed her as their own.
Temple Bar, February, 1863, p. 157.

Olivia Marchmont to be sure was impeded not only by a wild, indomitable passion, but by a fund of unused energy and genius. She is one of Miss Braddon's favorites, possessing

In a story now coming out, this feeling is shown in the portrait of a clergyman's daughter working her father's parish. Olivia is a model visitor of the poor-a sort of typical and transcendent district-visitor-who never lets a day pass unimproved, who allows no impediments, still less her own ease, to interfere with the work and duty before her. Most people learn to like such occupations even if not congenial; habit and the sense of usefulness make them more than tolerable. Olivia hates them with an ever-growing hatred, and they turn her into a fiend. Of course there is a good deal about the work not being done in a right spirit, being done "Devoured by a slow-consuming and peras duty, not in love; but this is a conspic-petual fire. Her mind was like one vast roll.

"The ambition of a Semiramis, the courage of a Boadicea, the resolution of a Lady Macbeth.”

She was

of parchment whereon half the wisdom of the world might have been inscribed, but on which was only written, over and over again, to maddening iteration, the name of Edward Arundel.

"Olivia Marchmont might have been a good and great woman. She had all the elements of greatness. She had genius, resolution, an indomitable courage, an iron will, perseverance, self-denial, temperance, chastity. But against all these qualities was set a fatal and foolish love for a boy's handsome face and frank, genial manner. If she could have gone to America, and entered herself amongst the feminine professors of law and medicine-if she could have set up a printing-press in Bloomsbury, or even written a novel-I think she might have been saved." —P. 477, April, 1863.

But even where there is not this disproportionate greatness of soul, where the task is in exact measure with the worker, Miss Braddon shows an equal repugnance to the humdrum and to the ordinary feminine ideal. Her odious females are all remakable for con

formity to the respectable type, whether as religious women doing their duty in a hard uncompromising way," or writing a "neat" letter, or cutting their husband's bread and butter, or "excelling in that elaborate and terrible science which woman paradoxically calls plain needlework."

Three things seem to have aided in this war against steady, unexcited well-doing, a familiarity at some time or the other with the drudgery of learning, and an equal familiarity with horses and with theatricals, not simply play-going, but life behind the scenes. Her heroines have all been disgusted by a routine education, some in their own person, some inflicting it on others. It is an excuse for Aurora's flight from school with her father's groom, that she was kept strictly to her lessons. Lady Audley was teacher in a school; Olivia Marchmont imposes an intolerable amount of dates, Roman history, and all the rest, on her hapless charge; and Eleanor, in "Eleanor's Victory," on one happy holiday

Ayres, the manufacture of tallow candles,' and the nine parts of speech."-Once a Week, p. 335, March, 1863.

The ordinary, well-educated young lady, the flower and triumph of civilization, who has mastered her lessons, the languages, the history, the difficult passages in the sonata in C flat, and liked them all, is alternately an object of amusement and contempt. In contrast with the glowing Aurora, we have a good-natured portrait of the model heroine of another school, learned in geography and astronomy and botany and chronology, and reading one of the novels that may lie on a drawing-room table. "How tame, how cold, how weak, beside that Egyptian goddess, that Assyrian queen, with her flashing eyes and the serpentine coils of purple-black hair.”

"The long arcades of beech and elm had reminded him from the first, of the solemn aisles of a cathedral; and coming suddenly to a spot where a new arcade branches off abruptly on his right hand, he saw, in one of the sylvan niches, as fair a saint as had ever been modelled by the hand of artist and believer the same golden-haired angel he had seen in the long drawing-room at Feldon Woods-Lucy Floyd, with the pale aureola about her head, her large straw hat in her lap, filled with anemones and violets, and the third volume of a novel in her hand. High Church novel, it is explained,' in because he did not perform the service acwhich the heroine rejected the clerical hero cording to the Rubric."-Aurora Floyd, vol. ii. p. 16.

6

A

How different from this serene inanity the unrestrained "expansive natures," unchecked by system of any sort, whose youth has been suffered to run wild, do what they like, form their own opinions, get into scrapes, and compromise themselves while still in their teens, which charm this writer's fancy! Nothing is so purely conventional an idea as that young girls untaught or ill-taught can be graceful or attractive, however favorite a notion it is with writers of fiction. But this clever, bright writer can describe an unattached, vagrant, slipshod existence with "Looked back wonderingly at the dull touches of truth, with admissions of the necroutine of her boarding-school existence. essary condition of such an existence, which Could it be possible that it was only a day or two since she was in the Brixton schoolroom give a greater air of reality to her pictures hearing the little ones, the obstinate, incorriThus, her Eleanor, whose gible little ones, their hateful lessons-their childhood has been passed with a disreputable, odious, monotonous repetitions of dry facts self-indulgent spendthrift of a father, with about William the Conqueror and Buenos, whom she had lived in occasional luxury and

than we often see.

habitual destitution, whose companion has those wretched positions which intoxication been a good-natured, slovenly scene-painter always chooses for its repose," as though she and theatrical supernumerary, who is now, had seen so much of it. And it is with peoat fifteen, a teacher in a third-rate boarding-ple in a scrape, or ready at any moment to school, shows in the following pretty picture fall into one, that she sympathizes. Blind nothing at variance with her bringing up. passion gets them into difficulties, blind trust The health and spirits of the solitary girl are carries others along with them; and trust is exciting the spleen of the sea-sick passengers a quality in wonderful favor with some peoof the Dieppe steamer :ple, as it indeed ought to be with all the heroines of the Aurora type-a trust which leads the big Yorkshireman thus to declare himself, in answer to the insinuations of the envious and respectable Mrs. Powell:

"You are a good husband Mr. Mellish,' she said with a gentle melancholy. Your wife ought to be happy,' she added, with a sigh, which plainly hinted that Mrs. Mellish was miserable.

Eyes dim in the paroxysms of sea-sickness had looked almost spitefully towards this happy, radiant creature, as she flitted hither and thither about the deck, courting the balmy ocean-breezes that made themselves merry with her rippling hair. Lips blue with suffering had writhed as their owners beheld the sandwiches which this young school-girl devoured, the stale buns, the flat raspberry tarts, hideous, bilious, revolting three-cornered puffs, which she produced at half good enough for her. What can I do "A good husband!' cried John; not different stages of the voyage from her shabby to prove that I love her?-what can I do? carpet-bag. She had an odd volume of a Nothing-except to let her have her own way. novel, and a long dreary desert of crochet- And what a little that seems! Why if she work whose white cotton monotony was only broken by occasional dingy oases, bearing witness of the worker's dirty hands; and they were such pretty hands, too, that it was a shame they should ever be dirty; and she had a bunch of flabby faded flowers, sheltered by a great fanlike shield of newspaper; and she had a smelling bottle which she sniffed at perpetually, though she had no need of any such restorative, being as fresh and bright from first to last as the sea-breezes themselves."

It is in the existence of the real with the impossible that this writer's power lies. This tart-loving child of fifteen is the girl who, three days later, devotes herself to vengeance, and lives for years in the unchanging hope of seeing the sharper who got her father's money hanged through her instrumentality. People are apt to think, though it is no such thing, that the knowledge of ordinary custom-loving human nature is a much easier thing than knowl- | edge of the waifs and strays of humanity, and this lady's experiences are ostentatiously of this exceptional kind. She would have us think that she views human nature generally in a scrape. Thus, she will ask, as if familiar with detectives and their mode of noting down their pencil memoranda, When they begin their pencils? and how it is that they always seem to have arrived at the stump? Again one of her characters is intoxicated: "his head is laid upon the pillow, in one of

wanted to set that house on fire, for the pleasure of making a bonfire,' he added, pointing to the rambling mansion in which his blue cyes had first seen the light, I'd let her do it and look on with her at the blaze.'"'— -Aurora Floyd, vol. ii. p. 237.

The whole idea of life and love in writers of this class is necessarily mischievous and, we will say, immoral. Independent of the fact that John " was duped by his wife all this time, that she knew her first husband was living and that therefore she was not his wife, the picture of the relation between these two is one really incompatible with the weight and seriousness of matrimonial obligations. There is a praise and sympathy for unreasoning blind idolatry very likely to find response in young readers, whether of the vain or romantic type; and the better it is done - the more sweetness and feeling is thrown into it—the more dangerous if it gets a hold, and keeps its ground. Husbands and fathers at any rate may begin to look about them and scrutinize the parcel that arrives from Mudie's, when young ladies are led to contrast the actual with the ideal we see worked out in popular romance; the mutual duties, the reciprocal forbearance, the inevitable trials of every relation in real life, with the triumph of mere feminine fascination, before which man falls prostrate and helpless. Take the following scene.

Aurora has to go up to London to buy off fascination: in every conspicuous example the interference of her real husband the these have all been wanting; still there are groom, whom her father supposes to be dead, people, no doubt, to agree with the sporting and of whom her husband knows nothing. community of Doncaster, who, we are told, The idolizing father welcomes her to the dis-one and all liked Aurora all the better for turbed and interrupted dinner :breaking her whip over a stable-boy's shoulder, and who are led willing captives by the varied and opposite manifestations of unchecked feeling, passion, and impulse, when there is beauty and grace enough to smooth over and conceal their real repulsiveness.

readers of a theological review for intruding the imagination it stimulates a vulgar curioson their notice scenes with certainly no direct ity, weakens the established rules of right bearing on the subjects to which its columns and wrong, touches, to say the least, upon are as a rule devoted. But we have thought things illicit, raises false and vain expectait well to enter our protest against the form tions, and draws a wholly false picture of life. of fiction most popular in the present day, Every true and honest observer of human nabecause we conceive it to fail both positively ture adds something to the common experiand negatively in the legitimate uses of fic-ence, but if anything new is to be learnt from tion. Negatively, because it asks least from the sensational novel, as far as our observathe sense, feeling, and thought of the reader; tion goes, it is in that field of knowledge and positively, because instead of quickening which emphatically is not wisdom.

writer on the existing state of the English law regarding copyrights of works by American authors. From the very day, it is said, when, by

IN an article on "Literary Piracy " in the now in London a popular rhapsodical preacher, American Publishers' Circular, of the date whose sermons have been largely republished in May 15, an attempt is made to turn the table this country, but whose temporary fame will be against British authors and publishers who have eclipsed by that of the inspired rhapsodist who complained of the piracy of British books by Amer- may succeed him in popular favor. There dwells icans. "We take the liberty," says the writer, in this quiet city of Philadelphia an erudite stu"of asserting as an undeniable fact that there is dent of the Scriptures, whose commentaries thereno living English author of established reputation, on give instruction to clergymen and sabbathwhose works are extensively republished in this school teachers wherever our language is spoken. country, who is not freely and properly, compen- Yet, while Spurgeon has recived as much as 5,000 sated by the American publisher. Our knowl- dollars in one year from his publishers in this edge of the large publishing houses in New York, country, Albert Barnes, although his notes have Boston, and this city (Philadelphia), and the sold to the extent of several hundred thousand information they have kindly furnished us upon copies in Great Britain, has never been favored the subject, cnable us to make our assertion with by the English publishers with a penny." Comconfidence. Our readers may rely upon it. Com-ments in the same strain are then made by the pensation is the rule. Large prices are paid in gross for advance sheets, or a quasi-copyright is paid upon the copies sold. The fact is, there is a competition for the publication, and our rep-a decision of the House of Lords (Aug. 5, 1854), resentative houses are constantly outbidding each the possibility of copyright by Americans in other for the privilege of exclusive republication. Britain was upset, and thus American authors As illustrations of our statement, we may say in Britain were reduced to the same condition as that Macaulay, Carlyle, Tennison, Dickins, Bul- British authors in America, British publishers wer, Collins, Reade, the author of 'Adam Bede,' ceased to offer any compensation to American De Quincy, Thackeray, Hughes, the Brownings, authors when reprinting their works. If the Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Mulock, Stanley, Boyd, Lyell, facts of this American writer are correct, it would Spurgeon, Mrs. Wood, Dr. Brown, the represent-appear that, whereas American publishers find ative of Sir William Hamilton, the representative it worth while on system to purchase early sheets of Hugh Miller, and others, have all received of British works, and have established an undercompensation from their American publisher." standing among themselves by which the purThe writer then proceeds: "Our English chaser of such early sheets is not interfered with critics 'reck not their own rede.' They ser- by his brother-publisher, British publishers have monize us about piracy, while they themselves, not yet found it worth while to establish any such true to their Norse origin and sea-king propen-system for the purchase of early American sheets. sities, are plundering around our literary coast, But the American writer's facts may be disputed. like the vikings of eld, in search of what they may devour. When, pray, within the last ten years, have they reciprocated our liberality by MISS BEWICK has just issued, through the forwarding a check to an American author? Our agency of Messrs. Longman & Co., "A Memoir books are freely republished by the generous of Thomas Bewick, written by himself." The Britons; but we have yet to learn when re- work is embellished with numerous unpublished cently the writers of them have been compensa-wood-engravings. ted. There is no such instance within our knowledge or information. It is not the rule of the trade in England to pay American authors, although it is our rule to pay her authors. We cannot forbear a single illustration. There is

THE third and fourth volumes of the late Sir Francis Palgrave's "History of Normandy ́ and England" are now in the press.