[In the following anonymous review, the critic denounces The Hillyars and Burtons as illogical.]

“The old question between love and duty,” says the author in his Preface, “I have in this story used all my best art in putting before the reader.” A bad best, we are constrained to say, Mr. Kingsley's best art seems to be.

It is true that, like most other problems given us to solve in this world, the problem of love and duty is so difficult, and so overlaid by confusing circumstances, that we go wrong oftener than right, and as men and women we do little more than repeat in a larger school our experience as children, when, after long puzzling over our sums, we used to work back from the right answer, and discover too late when it was that a false method misled us, making the correct solution thenceforth impossible, and the rest of our labor vain. But in books, in “novels of purpose,” which professedly aim to teach, even if we say nothing of the implied obligation resting on them to be artistically constructed, it must be regarded as a fault if there are gathered around the main subject so many extraneous and utterly irrelevant circumstances that it is wholly hidden from view, and we learn only from the Preface that there is a main question at all; and it is a greater fault if the difficulty selected for explication is one so very easy to deal with, and the failure to deal with it correctly so very obvious, as in the novel before us. Picking out the thread of the principal action from the varied mass of foreign material woven up with it, we may say that the problem is thus presented.

Emma Burton is a not very handsome, but very sensible English girl, “who might, I fancy, after a year and a half of boarding-school, have developed into a very noble lady.” She loves Erne Hillyar, who in turn, though he is the son and expected heir of a wealthy baronet, and she a working blacksmith's daughter, is much in love with her. To the union of this ill-assorted couple there seems to be no opposition on the part of the parents. But Emma has a brother Joseph. He in consequence of an injury received in childhood is a hunchback. This calamity, however, leaves his physical strength unimpaired, and, on the whole, proves of advantage to him, for he is thereby saved from the necessity of learning his father's trade, and enabled to devote his time to hard reading and attending school. Spite of his deformity, Joseph, as he increases in years and knowledge, becomes possessed of some considerable personal attractions; his frame is herculean, his head is massive and magnificent, his beautiful face is that of a Byron. Better than all, he is a genius, and there is in him a wonderful capacity for work. He is scarcely twenty when his character, talents, and acquirements are such that Sir George Hillyar declares himself his patron, and takes him into his household as private secretary at a salary of two hundred pounds a year. But soon his patron dies, misfortune overtakes his father, and the Burtons emigrate to that land of promise, Mr. Kingsley's Australia. Erne Hillyar has been cheated out of his inheritance, and sails from England in the same vessel that carries his mistress. They are hardly arrived in Cooksland, when Joseph is made second master of the government school at Palmerston, and not long afterwards, having meantime distinguished himself by a masterly report on the condition of his school, and the merits of the compulsory system of education, he is elected to a seat in the Provincial Parliament. Fortune favors his father, and the lucky discovery of a copper mine makes the Burtons the wealthiest people in Cooksland. While Joseph is still a very young man, he finds himself the Honorable Joseph Burton, a famous orator, Minister of Education, a member of the Governor's Council, and the husband of a lady, young, pretty, and rich.

To the work of taking care of this young man Emma Burton for some unaccountable reason insists on dedicating her life. Most people would consider him admirably qualified to take care of himself. But his sister declares that her duty requires the sacrifice of her love, and accordingly sacrifices it. Now if duty demanded the sacrifice, she did well to make it. Doubtless she did well to make it, if in her opinion duty demanded it. We intend to deny neither proposition. But though the willingness to become martyrs to duty be a fine thing, even that willingness confers upon us no right to insult common-sense. Emma Burton's love and life, her lover's health and happiness, were sacrificed, heroically sacrificed perhaps, but not to duty. Self-abnegation is truly the very flower of Christian character. Like the flower, its beauty is an unconscious beauty, and it blooms for delight of others, and not for its own. St. Pierre tells us, that on the banks of the Rhone, when the tide is high, there may be seen under the clear water what appear to be clusters of purple blossoms. Looking closely at them, however, the observer notices that, instead of swaying quietly with the tide, they seem to have an uneasy and self-communicated motion, and, watching intently, he discovers that the seeming flower is a diminutive polyp, busily revolving that it may create a little whirlpool into which is drawn the food to satisfy its greedy appetite. To us the heroine's vaunted devotion to duty seems as little like true sacrifice of self, as the polyp's voracity is like the perfume of the flower it resembles. To act as she acted under the given circumstances, there would be required one of those not uncommon natures, weak yet unfeeling and obstinate, that take delight in actions which indeed wear the semblance of self-sacrifice, but really are done to feed a diseased vanity, and to obtain that morbid pleasure which some minds feel in self-torture.

Emma Burton's character is represented as far removed from all this; she is sensible, loving, and thoroughly truthful. How is it then, that, in the most important affair of her life, she plays the part of the weak-minded, ill-natured girl,—a young lady who will have a mission? Because Mr. Kingsley, though undoubtedly a pleasing and clever writer when he treats of the mere surfaces of things, is altogether incompetent to the task of delineating character. Motives he can conceive, for he is a man; actions he can describe, for he is an observer by nature, and practised with the pen; but to conceive and set before us motives and actions in their relations with each other, and with the character to which he attributes them,—this is something beyond his skill.

In every part of his story, in the details of the plot, in the sentiments, in the language, this defect of inconsequence and incoherence is as marked as we have seen it to be in the main action. For example: the persons of the story are of course taken to Australia. In that land of anomalies our author is perfectly at home. His strength is never more clearly shown than in the power with which he paints for us the wild, impressive phenomena of nature in that unfamiliar continent, and the easy vigor with which he describes the strange Australian men and manners,—the bush-fight, the siestas, convicts, Cantabs, dragoons, expatriated Irish rebels, the struggles of colonial politics. But setting aside this consideration, the scene of action should have been kept in England, and the problem worked out there. Had the heroine and her brother remained in the country of their birth, where their position in the social scale was low, she might with a shadow of excuse have devoted her life to his service. Conscious of his fitness for higher things, yet deprived of the proper field in which to exert his excellent powers, it is not unlikely that, without the sympathy and tender care of a female friend, Joseph might have developed into a most unhappy and uncomfortable personage. But in the colony the case is different. His foot is hardly on the wharf before his path is made plain and easy to him. He gets first a competency and reputation, then wealth and honors, so that his sister renounces happiness for herself, and ruins the happiness of another, for no visible reason but that Joseph may be spared the infliction of living at a Palmerston boarding-house. In England the heroine's problem might have had a real existence; in Australia nothing but her whim could have galvanized it into any appearance of life.

So, too, in the language and sentiments of his characters our author's best art proves very insufficient. Here is the heroine when, fired with noble rage, she rebukes her lover, because upon hearsay evidence only he believes his brother to be a bad man:—

“I tell you boldly that your duty as a gentleman is to labor night and day to bring your brother into his father's favor. It will ruin you in a pecuniary point of view to do so; but if you wish to be a man of honor and a gentleman, if you wish to be with us all the same Erne Hillyar that we have learnt to love so dearly, you must do so.”

This is all well enough; but what shall we say of the following passages? It presents the same young lady when she is very angry with a Jew lad, who brings her a letter, and who requests that for his labor and travel he be kissed, declining indeed to deliver the packet till he has received his just reward. This is refused, and a good deal of preliminary sparring takes place. But suddenly Miss Burton dashes forward on her antagonist, feints cleverly with her left, gets home heavily on the boy's head, at the same moment snatches the letter with swift dexterity, ending the round and the fight with this volley of—what shall we say?—“Chin-music” we venture to call it, borrowing in our exigency a word from the Army of the Potomac:

“I'll kiss you! With pepper-my-Barney. O yes, with capsicums.”

But it would be idle to enumerate the many blemishes which in this book destroy all artistic effect. Were it not for the claim made in the Preface, it would perhaps have been hardly fair to notice them at all in a book of this class. On that head, therefore, we will say no more; and our concluding remarks shall touch briefly upon a topic which this history of a poor family's adventures forcibly suggests, though it does not avowedly treat. There are sermons in stones for those who can read them, and in any novel a thorough analysis will find a moral of some sort. In this novel, though, as we have seen, the preachment does little to enforce the particular doctrine of the text, yet the general system of which Mr. Kingsley and his better-known brother are regarded as the expounders is again brought before us. We now refer not to that rather inadequate religious theory which in “manliness” finds divinity, which affects to believe that “quiet pluck,” and striking out from the shoulder, and one or two other things more or less offensive in sound or in substance, are all that man needs for anything,—whether to save his soul alive, or to remove impediments in his speech. The household of that faith is not a large one. Although, when it was first preached, it may, in the minds of some young men, have added weight to the maxim fortiter pecca, and led some to smoke strong tobacco and practise the manly art,—though some may have followed after Bishop Synesius, the friend of Hypatia, riding hard and drinking strong liquors,—yet but few men at any time, and now-a-days almost none, have attempted to take the kingdom of heaven by violence of that sort. It is of the political and social theories of the gentlemen of this school that we wish to say a word or two, even at the risk of speaking out of season.

No gallery of a fifth-rate theatre ever gave more liberal applause to the bold British tar, whose cutlass had given him the victory over the profligate aristocrat and his minions, than these writers were in the habit of bestowing upon great-hearted gentlemen, who were by occupation journeymen tailors, kingly souls disguised thinly in mechanics' aprons, and accomplished ladies who by birth were slaves. We read their books not without pleasure. The tailor, to be sure, was illogical, and his temper was bad, the blacksmith's magnanimity and virtue were of the intensely self-conscious kind, but much, we thought, should be forgiven to writers who, with whatever weapons, fought bravely in vindication of the nobility of man, and in the cause of manhood against oppressive social and political institutions. In the war for democracy their blows seemed to fall upon our enemies; to our own peculiar and only aristocratic institution they had loudly proclaimed their hostility; the essential dignity of labor and the sinfulness of slave-holding were tenets common to our faith and theirs. Moreover, when we used to read the gloomy prognostications of the latter-day pamphleteers, and saw some cause to think that their most melancholy forebodings were to some extent justified by the actual condition of things in England, though we knew that the minor prophets are apt to be somewhat too denunciatory, still it was a great consolation to us to think that the other bulwark of liberty among the nations would not be suffered to decay without any note of warning, and that, if England was indeed becoming a waste wilderness, there were not wanting the voices of some crying within it, England's own sons giving words of reproof and counsel that might save her from ruin at the last. To find that all this bravery of words was mere fervid talk, was not pleasant. Yet it could have been nothing more.

A people whose system of government is based upon the nobility of man—the nobility of tailors, and rail-splitters, and tanners, as well as of other men—has for the last four years been defending its national existence against the attacks of a power which believed in a system diametrically opposite. Our humane system is the parent of justice, intelligence, enterprise. Their system encouraged listlessness and indolence and ignorance; the laws permitted them to sell children who had negro blood in their veins, and the customs were such that these children often were their own; their system made it a frequent necessity to whip women; the very life of it was that one half the population should be defrauded of the profits of their labor by the other half; their art of war seems to have included assassination and the poisoning of wells; of their social structure, what Governor McDuffie and Alexander H. Stephens announced as the corner-stone had already been described by John Wesley as the sum of all villanies,—a phrase now somewhat worn, but so true to the terrible fact, that before it shall be worn out the reality must perish.

Surely now, one would have said, the preachers of “manliness,” and “honor,” and “hault courage,” they who proclaimed “pluck,” the believers in the dignity of honest work, can never hesitate to rush into battle against an enemy so monstrous. These paladins will rejoice to hear the trumpet of the adventurous heathen blown for battle so near to the noblest camp of Christendom. The great and happy opportunity has come to vindicate the faith that is in them, and to show themselves true knights. How this hope and expectation have been answered, we need not say. The disappointment is one that can be borne. But what will those men say for themselves who for one pitiful reason or another have made it impossible for us to believe longer in their honesty or their sense? Nothing,—unless this can be said, that, if they wish to be considered as having any honesty at all, they must submit to be looked upon as, during the past four years, having had neither knowledge nor foresight.