[In the following essay, the anonymous author presents an overview of the sensation novel and evaluates the works of Wood, Norton, and Braddon—in the negative manner characteristic of critics of the period.]

We have been counselled not to ask why the former times were better than these, and are thus instructed to beware of enhancing the past in peevish depreciation of the present, the scene of our labours and trials. The check is constantly needed by those whose past is long enough ago to melt into harmonious, golden, defect-concealing distance; but we are disposed to think that such check is never more required than when a comparison is forced upon us of the popular ideal of charming womanhood in the times we remember, and what seems to constitute the modern ideal of the same thing. This ideal may be gathered from the poetry, the romance, and the satire of both periods, as well as from closer experience. There was a time when the charge against young ladies was a morbid love of sermons and a too exclusive devotion to the persons that preached them; then they were the subjects of tender ridicule for a fantastic refinement; then they doted upon Fouqué and his Sintram, and were prone to sacrifice solid advantages and worldly good things to a dream of romance; then it was interesting and an attraction, at least to seem to live in ignorance of evil; then they felt it good taste to shrink from publicity, and submitted to the rules of punctilio and decorum as if they liked them. Those were the days when the red coat was not unreasonably jealous of the academic gown, when dash was not the fashion, when the ordinary gaieties of life were entered into not without a disclaimer, and an anxiety to assert an inner preference for something higher and better, fuller of heart and sentiment, satisfying deeper instincts. Those were the days before Punch's generation of 'fast young ladies' were born; while it would still have been a wild impossibility for the Times to announce beforehand that an Earl's daughter would, on such an occasion and in such a theatre, dance an Irish jig, and a still wilder impossibility for the lady to keep her engagement, and for the illustrated papers afterwards to represent the feat in the moment of execution.

We are not saying that the generation of which this is a feature is really a falling off from that other generation which furnishes us with such pleasant memories. Each has its developments for good or evil, sense or nonsense. The one is composed of the daughters of the other. The history of society is a series of reactions from faults it has become alive to. We know all this; but the popular literature of the day, which undertakes to represent the thought and impulses of its own time, almost forces us into a frame of disparaging comparison. The novels of twenty and thirty years ago, which told us a good deal we did not like of the society of the period, have passed into oblivion; the notions and tendencies of to-day find their exponents in novels in everybody's hands. They are peopled with characters which, if they go beyond our observation, and exceed anything we have seen, yet indicate plainly enough the direction manners have taken, and are accepted as a portrait of life by the general reader, through his very act of taking them into favour.

The 'sensation novel' of our time, however extravagant and unnatural, yet is a sign of the times—the evidence of a certain turn of thought and action, of an impatience of old restraints, and a craving for some fundamental change in the working of society. We use the popular and very expressive term, and yet one much more easy to adopt than to define. Sensation writing is an appeal to the nerves rather than to the heart; but all exciting fiction works upon the nerves, and Shakspeare can make 'every particular hair to stand on end' with anybody. We suppose that the true sensation novel feels the popular pulse with this view alone—considers any close fidelity to nature a slavish subservience injurious to effect, and willingly and designedly draws a picture of life which shall make reality insipid and the routine of ordinary existence intolerable to the imagination. To use Punch's definition in the prospectus of the Sensation Times, 'It devotes itself to harrowing the mind, making the flesh creep, causing the hair to stand on end, giving shocks to the nervous system, destroying conventional moralities, and generally unfitting the public for the prosaic avocations of life.' And sensationalism does this by drugging thought and reason, and stimulating the attention through the lower and more animal instincts, rather than by a lively and quickened imagination; and especially by tampering with things evil, and infringing more or less on the confines of wrong. Crime is inseparable from the sensation novel, and so is sympathy with crime, however carefully the author professes, and may even suppose himself, to guard against this danger by periodical disclaimers and protests.

The one indispensable point in the sensation novel is, that it should contain something abnormal and unnatural; something that induces, in the simple idea, a sort of thrill. Thus, 'Transformation,' where a race of human beings inherit the peculiarities of the Faun, and in whom a certain conformation of ear characteristic of the Greek myth crops out at intervals, is sensational. The very clever story 'Elsie Venner' is sensational in the same way, where the heroine is part rattlesnake, and makes us shudder by her occasional affinities in look and nature with the serpent race. All ghost-stories, of course, have the same feature. In one and all there is appeal to the imagination, through the active agency of the nerves, excited by the unnatural or supernatural. But the abnormal quality need not outrage physical laws; exceptional outrages of morality and custom may startle much in the same way. Bigamy, or the suspicion of bigamy, is sensational as fully, though in a lower field, as are ghosts and portents; it disturbs in the same way the reader's sense of the stability of things, and opens a new, untried vista of what may be. All crime that seems especially incongruous with the perpetrator's state and circumstances is of this nature, and offers a very ready and easy mode of exciting that surprise and sense of novelty which is the one indispensable necessity. Of course no fiction can be absolutely commonplace and natural in all its scenes and incidents; some extraordinary conditions seem unavoidable in its machinery. Thus, story-writers of every age and style seem, by one consent, to ignore for their heroines the most universal and inevitable of all relationships. The heroines of fiction have no mothers. Every rule has its exception, of course; but the exception in this case proves the rule. Thus, the only mother we can think of in Sir Walter Scott's series of novels is Lady Ashton, a monstrous and unnatural mother, performing the very opposite of the maternal part. In the same way, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe has as good as none. Harriet Byron and her friends are motherless. Dickens has very few. None of Miss Bronte's or George Eliot's heroines have mothers, nor have Miss Ferrier's. Miss Edgworth has one or two model mothers, but most of her heroines are without. Miss Yonge, it must be granted, has one charming mother, who performs a mother's work, in the 'Heir of Redclyffe;' but the majority of her young people make all their mistakes for the want of one, and show their goodness by overcoming the evil consequences of that supreme deprivation. Those who write for children find it easier to devise probable and excusable scrapes without the maternal guardian of discipline and order. The moral story-teller can somehow inclucate principles, and supply examples more to his mind without. The mere novelist finds the mother a dull and unmanageable feature, except, indeed, where the scheming or tyrannical mother of the fashionable novel brings about the necessary tragic element, drives her daughter to despair by enforcing good matches, or oppresses her for mere envy of her youth and virgin graces. Miss Austin, who looked on life as it is, and shut her eyes to none of its ordinary conditions, has some mothers—Mrs. Bennet, the silly mother, who would drive any sensitive child wild with shame, and Mrs. Dashwood, who encouraged her daughter in sentimentalism—but her essential heroines are without. Mr. Thackeray's mothers merge into mothers-in-law. It is quite a feature of Mr. Trollope's course of fiction that he now and then gives us a real mother and does not feel embarrassed by the relation. However, we need not further pursue the inquiry.

This exceptional condition of early life—freedom from restraint, and untimely liberty of choice and action—then, belongs to the youth of all fiction. Of course, in sensational novels, this liberty is exaggerated indefinitely. There is nothing more violently opposed to our moral sense, in all the contradictions to custom which they present to us, than the utter unrestraint in which the heroines of this order are allowed to expatiate and develop their impulsive, stormy, passionate characters. We believe, it is one chief among their many dangers to youthful readers that they open out a picture of life free from all the perhaps irksome checks that confine their own existence, and treat all such checks as real hindrances, solid impediments, to the development of power, feeling, and the whole array of fascinating and attractive qualities. The heroine of this class of novel is charming because she is undisciplined, and the victim of impulse; because she has never known restraint or has cast it aside, because in all these respects she is below the thoroughly trained and tried woman. This lower level, this drop from the empire of reason and self-control, is to be traced throughout this class of literature, which is a consistent appeal to the animal part of our nature, and avows a preference for its manifestation, as though power and intensity came through it. The very language of the school shows this. A whole set of new words has come into use, and they are caught up and slipped into, as a matter of course, to express a certain degradation of the human into the animal or brutal, on the call of strong emotion. 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,' says the poet; the whole world of this school includes things that Shakspeare never dreamed of. Thus the victim of feeling or passion sinks at once into the inspired or possessed animal, and is always supposed to be past articulate speech; and we have the cry, the smothered cry of rage, the wail, the low wailing cry, the wail of despair, with which, if our readers are not familiar, ad nauseam, we can only say we are. The curious thing is, that probably no writer ever heard a woman utter this accepted token of extreme emotion, which would indeed be a very intolerable habit in domestic life; but it is evidently accepted by a very large circle as the exponent of true, thorough-going passion. It is the same with motion. It is man's privilege to walk; in novels men, or at any rate the women, creep. In love, in helplessness, in pity, in tenderness, this abject, fawning, cat-like movement is found the most expressive sign of a mental posture. Again, these people writhe and twist and coil themselves. 'This self-sustained and resolute woman writhed in anguish.' They have 'serpentine arms,' and 'snake-like, Medusa locks.' On occasion they will stand rampant, erect, with glittering serpent eyes. They are prone to blows. It is one of the privileges of reason and cultivation that men can be angry through their minds and tongues alone, but the people in all sensation writing rush to blows at once. Whatever training they may have had, it all drops from them on provocation, and the wild animal proclaims itself. Most readers are familiar with Aurora Floyd's castigation of her stable-boy; indeed, this fascinating lady is so ready with her natural weapons, that we find her on one occasion in the presence of two men, on whom she has inflicted stripes and scratches, the scars of which they will carry to their graves. And the writer of 'East Lynne' is not behind her more impetuous sister authoress in her belief in the possibility of blows in civilized circles, for she makes a countess strike her heroine furiously on each cheek, while that interesting young lady was her guest, stimulated solely by the jealousy of one pretty woman for another. But what will not Mrs. Wood's countesses do?—though, indeed, Mrs. Norton, who should know what grand ladies are made of, brings her marchioness to very much the same pass of animal abandon. Blows imply passion, so perhaps it is needless to speak of the previous uncontrolled passion, which is another characteristic of the sensational heroine in common with brute nature; but Miss Braddon enlarges on it, as a feature of the temper that most interests her, in terms which we prefer to our own:—

'Have you ever seen this kind of woman in a passion?—impulsive, nervous, sensitive, sanguine. With such a one passion is a madness—brief, thank Heaven!—and expending itself in sharp, cruel words, and convulsive rendings of lace and ribbon, or coroner's juries might have to sit even oftener than they do.'—Aurora Floyd, vol. ii. p. 264.

And the scene in 'East Lynne,' where Barbara, with vehement hysterical passion, upbraids the innocent and unconscious Carlyle for having married somebody else, is another example of the disgraceful unrestraint which some writers think a feature of the ideal woman. Another characteristic is the possession by one idea—an idea so fixed and dominant that the mind impregnated by it has no choice but to obey. The faithful or the vicious animal is so influenced, but a man thus out of his own control is on the high road to madness. However, it is thought sublime, and the reader is expected to be awed by the strength of a character led by some immoveable and absorbing notion, amenable neither to time nor place nor manners, nor to any of the influences that turn our thoughts from one thing to another, and multiply and divide our interests. And it is certain that a good many people think this a very grand form of nature; and an index of power in a writer even to conceive such a thing, whether natural or not, as something colossal, overshadowing their imagination. It is a refreshing change, for instance, from the monotony of easy reasonable social life to follow the moods, or rather the mood—for she has but one—of a woman of this type, who is for ever apostrophising herself 'with a smothered cry of rage,' 'Is there no cure for this disease? is there no relief except madness or death?' In a current story by the same hand ('Eleanor's Victory'), we have a girl of sixteen devoting her life to vengeance in the following strain; and we know Miss Braddon's style too well to doubt she will keep her word:—

' "I don't know this man's name (with whom her father had played his last game at ecarté); I never even saw his face; I don't know who he is, or where he comes from; but sooner or later I swear to be revenged upon him for my father's cruel death."

' "Eleanor, Eleanor!" cried the Signora, "is this womanly? is this Christian-like?"

' "I don't know whether it is womanly or Christian-like," she said, "but I know that it is henceforth the purpose of my life, and that it is stronger than myself." '

—Once a Week, April, p. 415.

In like manner, instinct is a favourite attribute: reason may be mistaken, but instinct never. In one story we have two girls, within a page or two of one another, who read characters like a book, and see villany at a glance in persons who have passed for respectable all their lives. 'When I look at people,' says one, 'I always seem to know what they are;' while the other, with inane simplicity, apologises for her insight, 'I cannot help seeing things.' Another characteristic closely allied to all these is fatality. It is no use trying to be good; they do try; but Elsie Venner can no more eradicate the rattlesnake-malice out of her nature than can these less avowedly fated women their evil propensities. Thus, in 'East Lynne,' Lady Isabel is impelled to the worst wrong against her will:—

'She (the wife of Carlyle) was aware that a sensation all too warm, a feeling of attraction towards Francis Levison, was waking within her; not a voluntary one. She could no more repress it than she could her own sense of being; and mixed with it was the stern voice of conscience, overwhelming her with the most lively terror. She would have given all she possessed to be able to overcome it, &c. &c.'

—East Lynne, vol. ii. p. 2.

And again, we are bid not to doubt the principles of a lady whose practice was undoubtedly open to question:—

'Oh! reader, never doubt the principles of poor Lady Isabel; her rectitude of mind, her wish and endeavour to do right, her abhorrence of wrong; and her spirit was earnest and true, her intentions were pure.'

She did not, in fact, encourage the temptation which overcame her:—

'She did not encourage these reflections—from what you know of her you may be sure of that—but they thrust themselves continually forward.'

'On what a slight thread do the events of life turn,' is the favourite language of this school, which, as they interpret it, means, or seems to mean, that there are temptations that are irresistible. Thus, 'Olivia Marchmont' might have made a saint but for unluckily falling in love with a good-natured cousin, provokingly unconscious of his conquest. As it was she was a fiend; but she had not succumbed without many struggles to her sin and despair. 'Again and again she had abandoned herself to the devils at watch to destroy her, and again and again she had tried to extricate her soul from their dreadful power; but her most passionate endeavours were in vain. Perhaps it was that she did not strive aright; it was for this reason, surely, that she failed so utterly to arise superior to her despair; for otherwise that terrible belief attributed to the Calvinists, that some souls are foredoomed to damnation, would be exemplified by this woman's experience. She could not forget. She could not put away the vengeful hatred that raged like an all-devouring fire in her breast, and she cried in her agony, "There is no cure for this disease!" '

We have placed 'East Lynne' at the head of our series not as the most marked example of the school, but as first in time. This story was brought into notice—and, indeed, extensive notoriety, by a puff in the Times, which represented it as a work of extraordinary power, dealing with the depths of our nature in a master's spirit. This imprimatur might not have told as it did, but for the authoress's real power of telling a story; but it unquestionably invested it with a credit and reputation which must have cost the docile reader some trouble to reconcile with his own impressions, and which strike us as grossly beyond the actual merits of the work. When we say that a writer's style is vulgar, there may, unquestionably, be the excuse of a pardonable and inevitable ignorance. A person may have many of the qualities of a novelist, and yet neither have the habits of the circle it pleases him to describe, nor be familiar with pure English as it is spoken and written. Still, genius is a keen, quick-witted power; it possesses the principle of selection, and instinctively perceives and holds by the best. Mrs. Wood's persistent use of certain vulgarisms, such as the uniform substitution of like for as—'Like I did;' 'He was deep in the business of packing, like his unfortunate brother had been;' and, above all, her unconscious use of the word 'party' for a single person, are telling facts; as where the stately hero, in some crisis of fate, alludes to the 'party' who is working mischief and ruin; or where a ghost alarms a neighbourhood, and the clergyman has to mention with reluctance a family name: 'the—the party that appears to be personating Frederick Massingberd;' and again another, in great perplexity, 'I cannot say if it be the party I suspect;' and so on. We maintain that observation, that first requirement in those who are to picture human nature, as well as ear, must be wanting where such habits as these can be persisted in. It is of a piece with those descriptions of spring which bring the fragrant violet, and the fresh green of the oak together, and with those pictures of manners which represent the town clerk as asking the bench of magistrates to pipes and ale, announcing his attention in these dignified terms, 'I entertain the bench of justices to-night, Barbara, to pipes and ale;' and carrying it out to the fortunate recipients of these favours with ' "I have been considering that you had better all five come and smoke your pipes at my house this evening, when we shall have time to discuss what must be done. Come at seven, not later, and you will find my father's old jar replenished with the best broad-cut, and half a dozen churchwarden pipes. Shall it be so?" The whole five accepted the invitation eagerly.'—(East Lynne, vol. i. p. 68). With manners which make it natural in a courtly earl to ask as his first question, after introducing his daughter to this same young attorney, 'Is she not handsome?'

We do not know what to say of the courage which shall plunge boldly into the manners of a society of which the writer has not the remotest experience. Success must be the only test of the right to do so. Shakspeare made kings talk, and kings are willing to be so drawn by him; they know, at any rate, that they are not more kingly than he represents them. Whether earls and earls' daughters will be content with the figure they make in Mrs. Wood's pages is another question. At any rate, Mrs. Wood is very much at her ease when she sets fine ladies and gentlemen talking, and thinks nothing of making a Lady Mary not only accept a lout of an apothecary, who is for ever pounding drugs on a counter, but eagerly jump at him, and express a wish he had asked her years before. There are no misgivings, no timidity in her portraiture; the fashionable flirt breaks into vituperation as fluently as Lady Carolina Wilhelmina might have done, and is jealous in five minutes' time of the looks of admiration cast at the younger beauty. The fatally fascinating Captain, a scion of the aristocracy, makes quick work of it, and before the end of the first evening, by dint of profuse compliments, pointed by glances from 'eyes of the deepest tenderness,' 'draws vivid blushes' from the delicate, sensitive heroine, not of offended maiden pride, but from a heart touched by an indelible impression. This is the sort of writing we might very well expect from the preliminary training of a temperance novel ('Danesbury House'), in which, by unflinching, conscientious adherence through every page to the subject of strong drinks and different forms and degrees of drunkenness, Mrs. Wood won the hundred pound prize, but it materially detracts from her right to any high stand in our literature. It is perhaps inevitable that the self-taught and guess-work novelist should jumble ranks and utterly confuse our notion of the social standing of the dramatis personœ; and this is especially the case in all Mrs. Wood's writings. Barbara, the second wife, who succeeds Lady Isabel, with her flippancy, her vulgar finery, her outspoken declaration of love, might be supposed to be some milliner's apprentice, but we believe is really intended to be an English lady. We observe an appreciation of out-of-door successes, an expectation from chance and irregular introductions, which marks a certain class. If the hero gets into a train in an anxious preoccupied state of mind, it is supposed that his silence, indifference, and failure in petits soins, will be felt an injury by any young and handsome woman in the same carriage, who, it is taken for granted, regards every public place a scene of conquest.

When this lady gives herself up to the odd and eccentric, we still less know where we are. Each of her novels has a humorist. In 'East Lynne' it is a Miss Corny, a sister of the heroic attorney, a violent woman, who assaults her suitors, shakes the breath out of her brother's clerk on the slightest provocation, and dresses like a madwoman, but who is still treated with marked respect as well as awe by her neighbours, and allowed by the attorney to force herself upon his wife and be virtual mistress of his household. This low and wild virago is the companion to the Lady Isabel, and it strikes the refined and devoted husband as a good arrangement on the whole. Humour is not a common feminine gift, so that we ought to be indulgent of mere failure; but, unfortunately, this lady fails not only in execution, but in the first idea of a fit subject for jest. The ordinary routine of the toilet, for instance, seems to be regarded as an inexhaustible field for mirth. We might say, she is most particularly amiss when she dwells on the details of masculine attire; except that the betrayal of her own sex, and all the little expedients by which the inroads of age may be warded off, is, perhaps, still more unpleasing, and is especially unfair upon the single ladies she holds up to ridicule—first, for being single; next, for being no longer young; next, for losing with youth itself some of the charms of youth; and last, for having recourse to any means of arresting Time's ravages. These are all such common characteristics of third-class novels, sensational or otherwise, that we should not notice them but that more than one leader of opinion has committed itself to a wholesale approval of 'East Lynne,' and one has gratuitously pronounced it not vulgar.

The acknowledged new element of this order of fiction is the insecurity given to the marriage relation. Unless we go with the bride and bridegroom to church, and know every antecedent on each side, we cannot be at all sure that there is not some husband or wife lurking in the distance ready to burst upon us. When once the idea enters the novel-writer's mind, it is embraced as a ready source of excitement, and capable of a hundred developments. Except that the circumstances are actually impossible, and would, we think, be very revolting if they were possible, the predicament is invested with real interest in 'East Lynne.' The moral fault of the book is, that the heroine has imputed to her a delicacy and purity of mind in utter variance with her whole course. None but a thoroughly bad woman could have done what Lady Isabel did. She had not the ordinary temptation to wrong; and as for those fine distinctions between affection and love which some ladies are prone to refine upon, we count them among the most mischievous of sentimental speculations. Lady Isabel, for example, marries the attorney, has a great affection for him, is exacting of his attention and devotion to herself, is capable of passionate jealousy, and all the while, we are ashamed to say, loves somebody else. At last she runs off with the Captain—then behold! instantly, in five minutes, she finds out her mistake, and begins to love the attorney and hate the other; and finally, on this connexion breaking in the usual way, she disguises herself, being supposed by the outraged and re-married husband to be dead, engages herself as governess to her own children, and dies, we may almost say, of jealousy of the new wife who succeeds to her old privileges; for the first time being thoroughly in love with him who had been her husband. Her first conception of this scheme is thought an occasion for some religious sentiment, and so we read—

'She had a battle to do with herself that day—now resolving to go, and risk it; now shrinking from the attempt. At one moment it seemed to her that Providence must have placed this in her way, that she might see her children in her desperate longing; at another, a voice appeared to whisper that it was a wily, dangerous temptation flung across her path—one which it was her duty to resist and flee from. Then came another phase of the picture—How should she bear to see Mr. Carlyle the husband of another?—to live in the same house with them, and witness his attentions, possibly his caresses? It might be difficult; but she could force and school her heart to endurance. Had she not resolved in her first bitter repentance to take up her cross daily, and bear it? No; her own feelings, let them be wrung as they would, should act as the obstacle.'

She had not been long in her new post when we read—

'When Lady Isabel was Mr. Carlyle's wife, she had never wholly loved him. The very utmost homage that esteem, admiration, affection, could give was his; but that mysterious passion called by the name of love (and which, as I truly and heartily believe, cannot in its refined etherialism be known to many of us) had not been given to him. It was now, I told you some chapters back, that the world goes round by the rule of contrary—conter-rary, mind you, the children have it in their game—and we go round with it. We despise what we have, and covet that which we cannot get. From the very night she had come back to East Lynne, her love for Mr. Carlyle had burst forth with an intensity never before felt. It had been smouldering almost ever since she quitted him. "Reprehensible!" groans a moralist. Very. Everybody knows that, as Aby would say. But her heart, you see, had not done with human passions, and they work ill and contrariness (let the word stand, critic, if you please), and precisely everything they should not.'

—East Lynne, vol. iii. 252.

The predicament is undoubtedly one fruitful of singular situations. Mr. Carlyle, to do him justice, is faithful to each obligation as it arises, and the same scenes that interested the reader when Lady Isabel was his wife are repeated to the letter when Barbara succeeds to that place which had been the object of such outspoken solicitude. In old times Barbara had peeped and listened in torture to Lady Isabel's singing of Mr. Carlyle's favourite songs, he standing by her chair and turning her leaves, with many tender interruptions. Now the process is reversed. It is Lady Isabel who peeps and listens, and Barbara sings the very same song, which must, we should say, be of very commanding merit to continue a favourite under such an awkward weight of unpleasant association. The thing is degrading to all parties, more so than the writer has any thought of; and her heroine is sunk still lower by the contempt that is thrown on her betrayer, to whom we are first introduced as a fascinating lady-killer, but who develops into a pitiful, abject, blundering wretch, talking the lowest slang, and finally dragged through a horse-pond, in the very sight of Lady Isabel, who, we are so often told, had been endowed with a sensitively refined delicacy. This, no doubt, is all done for the moral; but what must the woman have been to sacrifice heart and soul to so poor a creature?

Some scenes there are of interest and of such power as belongs to thoroughly realizing a conception. The authoress is best in tragedy. She has a vivid picture before her, though of the sentimental sort. There are indeed no close touches as far as we see; nor anything of which we can say, 'This is true to nature,' but the situation is well sustained. At the close of the story the erring wife watches the deathbed of her boy, whom she dare not claim as her own child:—

'William (her dying child) slept on silently. She thought of the past. The dreadful reflection, "If I had not—done—as I did, how different would it have been now!" had been sounding its knell in her heart so often, that she had almost ceased to shudder at it. The very nails of her hands had, before now, entered the palms with the sharp pain it brought. Stealing over her more especially this night as she knelt there, her head lying on the counterpane, came the recollection of that first illness of hers. How she had lam, and, in her unfounded jealousy, imagined Barbara the house's mistress. She dead—Barbara exalted to her place—Mr. Carlyle's wife—her child's step-mother! She recalled the day when her mind, excited by certain gossip of Wilson's—it was previously in a state of fever bordering on delirium—she had prayed her husband, in terror and anguish, not to marry Barbara! "How could he marry her," he had replied in soothing pity. "She!—Isabel was his wife; who was Barbara? Nothing to them." But it had all come to pass. She had brought it forth; not Mr. Carlyle—not Barbara; she alone. Oh! the dreadful memory of the retrospect. Lost in thought, in anguish past and present, in selfcondemning repentance, the time passed on. Nearly an hour must have elapsed since Mr. Carlyle's departure, and William had not disturbed her. But—who is this coming into the room? Joyce.

'She hastily rose up, and, as Joyce advanced with a quiet step, drew aside the clothes to look at William. "Master says he has been wanting me," she observed. "Why—oh!"

'It was a sharp, momentary cry, subdued as soon as uttered. Madame Vine sprang forward to Joyce's side looking also. The pale, young face lay calm in its utter stillness; the busy little heart had ceased to beat. Jesus Christ had come, indeed, and taken the fleeting spirit.

'Then she lost all self-control. She believed that she had reconciled herself to the child's death; that she could part with him without too much emotion. But she had not anticipated it would be quite so soon. She had deemed that some hours more would at least be given him; and now the storm overwhelmed her. Crying, sobbing, calling, she flung herself upon him; she clasped him to her; she dashed off her disguising glasses; she laid her face upon his, beseeching him to come back to her, that she might say farewell—to her, his mother—her darling child—her lost William.

'Joyce was terrified, terrified for consequences. With her full strength she pulled her from the boy, praying her to consider, to be still. "Do not, do not, for the love of Heaven! My lady! my lady!"

'It was the old familiar title that struck upon her fears, and induced calmness. She stared at Joyce, and retreated backwards, after the manner of one retreating from a hideous vision.

' "My lady, let me take you into your room. Mr. Carlyle is coming; he is but bringing up his wife. Only think if you should give way before him! Pray come away!"

' "How did you know me?" she asked in a hollow voice.

' "My lady, it was that night when there was an alarm of fire. I went close up to you to take Master Archibald from your arms; and as sure as I am now standing here, I believe that for the moment my senses left me. I thought I saw a spectre, the spectre of my dead lady. I forgot the present, I forgot that all were standing round me; that you, Madame Vine, were alive before me. Your face was not disguised then; the moonlight shone full upon it, and I knew it, after the first few moments of terror, to be, in dreadful truth, the living one of Lady Isabel. My lady, come away; we shall have Mr. Carlyle here."

'Poor thing, she sank upon her knees in her humility, her dread. "Oh! Joyce, have pity upon me! don't betray me. I will leave the house, indeed I will. Don't betray me while I am in it."

' "My lady, you have nothing to fear from me. I have kept the secret buried within my heart since then—last April! It has nearly been too much for me. By night and by day I have had no peace, dreading what might come out. Think of the awful confusion, the consequences, should it come to the knowledge of Mrs. Carlyle. Indeed, my lady, you ought never to have come."

' "Joyce," she said, hollowly, lifting her haggard face, "I could not keep away from my unhappy children. Is it no punishment to me, think you, the being here?" she added vehemently. "To see him—my husband—the husband of another! It is killing me."

‧ "Oh, my lady, come away! I hear him! I hear him!"

'Partly coaxing, partly dragging, Joyce took her into her own room, and left her there. Mr. Carlyle was at that moment at the door of the sick one. Joyce sprang forward. Her face, in emotion and fear, was one of livid whiteness, and she shook, as William had shaken, poor child, in the afternoon. It was only too apparent in the well-lighted corridor.

' "Joyce," he exclaimed in amazement, "what ails you?"

' "Sir! master!" she panted, "be prepared; Master William—Master William—"

' "Joyce; not dead?"

' "Alas! yes, sir." '

—East Lynne, vol. iii. p. 250.

When Lady Isabel is about to die, and it becomes necessary to inform Carlyle who has been his inmate all this while, the effect the news takes upon him shows a realization of the usual position: 'The first clear thought that came thumping through his brain was, that he must be a man of two wives.' Happily, the embarrassment does not last long, and the lady dies after an interview of penitence and explanation.

The same perplexity forms one main point in the hero's trials in the authoress's next work, 'Verner's Pride.' In this there is an estate of which we never know who is the master, and a lady of whom we cannot tell who is the husband, and, indeed, Lionel is put in about as delicate a dilemma, and his conscience as oddly tried, as we remember to have known it. He is represented as a person of peculiarly scrupulous honour, yet we find him making two offers in one day—the one to the woman he likes, the other to an old love who had jilted him for some one else, for no reason at all that we can see, except that it occurred to him as the most convenient thing to do at the moment. Of course it is a fatal mistake, and he gets punished for his temporary hallucination. The lady is by no means ill drawn, only she is not worth drawing with the elaboration bestowed upon her. Sibylla is silly and vain, a vulgar flirt, and ruinously extravagant, and a woman thus endowed, we all know, can say and do things called incredible. She tests her husband's heroic virtue and forbearance to the uttermost, and the moment comes when there seems a road of escape for him. A ghost appears on the scene who drives the rustics out of their wits, and presently convinces wiser observers that the lady's first husband (for Sibylla was a widow) was in life. The news reaches Lionel, and also the lady, who manifests very little concern at the reappearance, when she ascertains that whoever is her husband, she still remains mistress of Verner's Pride. Some persons of scrupulous mind recommend the withdrawal of the lady into retirement until the mystery is solved; but it seems considered a noble generosity in the hero that he stands by his wife, who, whenever she is in a pet, declares her preference for her first choice; though the whole point of the merit lies in the fact that he really likes the ill-used Lucy best, and, in fact, tells her so whenever they are together.

We have innumerable passages like the following:—

'He crossed over to her and laid his hand fondly and gently on her head as he moved to the door. "May God forgive me, Lucy," broke from his white trembling lips. "My own punishment is heavier than yours." '

—Verner's Pride, vol. ii. p. 127.

After such scenes we find him indeed making the amende to his wife, 'My little wife, if you cared for me as I care for you, &c. &c.,' with the explanation—'And there was no sophistry in this speech. He had come to the conviction that Lucy ought to have been his wife; but he did care for Sibylla very much.' The above fatherly and benedictory caress we observe to be coming very much into fashion upon paper, as a sort of disinfectant of questionable scenes, rendering harmless a good deal of flirtation which might otherwise be deemed of very doubtful propriety. In the matter of the ghost Lionel proved to be right, as the apparition turned out not to be the first husband, but his elder brother, also supposed to be dead, assuming his likeness. So Sibylla loses Verner's Pride after all, and tries her husband's indomitable patience, till she conveniently kills herself by going to a ball in a critical state of health. The story of course ends in the union of Lucy and Lionel, who agree that they have had long to wait for their present happiness, an ill-chosen word surely where a living wife has been a hindrance.

There is much in Verner's Pride entirely beneath criticism—irrelevant matter, awkwardly brought in and awkwardly expressed. Indeed, both in grace of style and aptitude to embrace the variety and poetry of any scene she describes, this writer in her best efforts falls greatly short of the two ladies we have classed with her, as illustrating a certain literary phase of our day—the Hon. Mrs. Norton and Miss Braddon—though the moral tone, in profession, and as entertaining the idea of duty when opposed to feeling, is superior to either.

Mrs. Norton's best friends are obliged to admit that her story, 'Lost and Saved,' is unfit for the drawing-room table, and ought to be kept out of the way of young ladies. In fact, in urging a great wrong upon the world, she is supposed to be compelled to disregard minor proprieties. The alleged purpose of the book is to show, that while the faults of women are visited as sins, the sins of men are not even visited as faults. She fights the battle of her sex by showing the injustice of the world, in its severity towards a certain class of errors, if committed by the helpless and the weak, and the tolerance of the same and much worse when perpetrated by the powerful and strong. Its highest morality as we see it is, that to sin with feeling is better than to sin without. There is the artifice of making a certain class of errors look light, by contrasting them with extremes of egotism, malignity, and positive crime; and the exigencies of the argument require society to be painted in the strongest and harshest colours. We observe that her admirers assume the leading characters to be, if not actual portraits, at least very intimate studies; and it is certainly more charitable to suppose that certain individuals are indicated by these 'studies' than that they represent to the writer's mind the prevailing characteristics of noble and fashionable society in our own day. Mrs. H. Wood writes about great people in artless and transparent ignorance of the gay world she describes. Mrs. Norton cannot be ignorant, but something else may make her pictures as little trustworthy. When a writer has opportunities of knowing that he is writing about superiors, perhaps, to his reader, that reader is apt to put on a deferential state of mind; but the deference may be wholly misplaced. If Sir Bulwer Lytton, though familiar with statesmen, may present to us the expansive exuberant prime minister we meet with in his novels, and nowhere else; if a college fellow draw a picture of university life absolutely at variance with his experience; and if a schoolmaster delineate impossible boys, then may a fine lady paint society such as she has never seen it, knowing better all the while, but doing it simply for amusement, or because there is wanting the power to see things as they are, or because a theory demands it, or the plot of a story must have it, or because it would be pleasant if it were so, or from disappointment, or temper, or malice. Any of these causes are, we see, sufficient to make an author reverse, and utterly defy his knowledge. In Mrs. Norton's case, it need only be that some bitter and angry soreness has tempted her to extreme limits of exaggeration and caricature. Her peeresses have certainly a body and a tone about them very different from the dressed-up milliners of courageous inexperience; but she shows them through distorted glass, and in blue and lurid lights. Hence a veritable glimpse of Pandemonium. While page after page denounces the ill nature, scandal, and harsh judgment of the world, what is technically called society is shown us in an aspect which might lead us to suppose we had opened a cynical French novel in mistake. There are the same horrors of profligacy attributed to a class, and the same shameless intrigue as the habitual practice of persons receiving the respect and homage of the world. All vice seems to culminate in a certain Milly Nesdale. Milly is the wife of Lord Nesdale, and the mother of lovely children, whom she professes to foster and care for. She maintains the faint externals of duty and respectability and religion, but is in fact more of an atheist than M. About's hero who believed in Fridays, and has no more faith in Christianity than in Vishnu. Under a thin cloak of propriety she is a serpent, a witch, a fiend, betraying her trusting husband with malignant triumph, and doing and saying things which it is better to glance at than repeat. This lady is a universal favourite, courted by the hero's friends, as keeping him out of what their worldliness fears more, and sustaining her credit and fascinations undisturbed to the end.

'And how the world loved Milly.'

…..

'For there is a little society in a corner called "The Society for the Suppression of Vice," but there is a much larger society for its protection; and in that larger society Right and Wrong do not signify, but Success and Non-Success.'—Lost and Saved, vol. ii. 86.

And Milly is loved by the world in no ignorance of her real qualities. All her friends would have recognised her in the description—

'Her body was lithe as the liana, and her soul was the soul of the snake—rampant, watchful, cautious—till a safe noiseless spring and a sudden coil gave her her prey.'—P. 88.

While to her lover, who listens to her treacherous and base words, lightened by

'The wily Hindoo smile which still lingered in Milly's features; it seemed that he had sold his soul to a species of charming water-witch rather than given his heart to a woman.'

The heroine, in contrast to this complicated wickedness, is a sweet, impulsive, highly-gifted, unsophisticated girl, who is the victim of a mock marriage, which the world will not believe her to have been the dupe of. There is an air of this mock marriage being in deference to English prejudice. We cannot help thinking, had the story been written for French readers, it would have been dispensed with, for the whole tone of the book points to another state of things, and certainly pleads for those, unhappy and betrayed, who can pretend to no such extenuation. Otherwise, why hits, in the tone of the author of 'No Name,' at our 'cruel laws,' involving illegitimate children in 'intolerable misfortune,' for the ordinary victims of these laws have nothing to do with even the pretence of marriage. Moreover, when Beatrice learns that the so-called marriage was not legal, it makes no difference in her course of action; she waits where she is till the real marriage shall be performed. Mrs. Norton can draw a graceful picture of innocent, happy simplicity. Her heroine, though conventional, as are her father, her saintly sister, her midshipman brother, is often interesting. But she identifies her too closely with some one else for the simplicity to be genuine; her language, when moved and excited, is that of a passionate woman of the world. There are curious experiences given to her, true we dare say, but which really come at a much later date than the heroine stage. We must own to some surprise, how any cultivated mind, refined by poetry, and even genius, can possibly reduce a heroine to such extremities of degradation as are brought about in Beatrice's search for a living, after she is abandoned by Treherne. The belief in intrinsic purity ought to preserve any favourite conception of the imagination from such contacts, such base suspicions; but, we believe, wherever there is unrestraint, whether the undisciplined element is found in a writer who talks of earls and marchionesses in blindest ignorance, or absolute knowledge, there is vulgarity: the vulgarity of recklessness as to exact truth, or its consequences; a resolution to say your say, to produce its effect, to prove your point, and to secure readers at all hazards. In this unrestrained spirit is executed the portrait of the Marchioness of Updown, with all the details of her 'corpulence,' her 'snorting,' and coarsely-selfish abandon. It has the air of a caricature of some person unfortunate enough to have incurred a lively authoress's ill will, and, as it stands, seems as little likely to be a correct likeness of an individual as it is of a class. However, the Marchioness forms the life of some spirited scenes; and though she is one of the respectable people who sanction the disreputable Nelly, her own errors are so far in a presentable form, that we need not scruple to lay them before our readers. This great lady is aunt of the wicked hero, Montague Treherne, and had known Beatrice in her happier days. Now, through a humble companion and amiable dependant, who had helped Beatrice in her sorest need, she comes again, though unknowingly, in contact with her as the purchaser of some valuable lace. Some slight error of the much-bullied companion had flurried the great lady's temper. Beatrice, who is now a lace-cleaner, had not returned the precious fabric as soon as expected. The Marchioness of Updown, flustered and furbelowed, and accompanied by the policeman she had summoned, makes her way to the heroine's poor lodgings.

'The Marchioness breasted the narrow staircase as though she were about to scale the battlements of a surrendering fortress. "Go before me into this den," she said to Parkes, "and show me where my lace is! I'm not going to be put off with false excuses any longer, I can tell you. Get me my lace. Mr. Sergeant, you are to follow me; you, John, stand at the door. We'll soon see if people are to be kept out of their property this way." She pushed the door wide open as Parkes crept in before her; and Parkes had only time to murmur that she hoped Beatrice would not feel frightened; and to hear the word "frightened" in proudest contempt, before the bulky and bulkily-dressed Marchioness stood in the small room.'

Beatrice refuses to give back the lace, and returns the money which had been sent for it.

"Ho!" almost screamed the Marchioness; "you dare, you bad, bad girl. Policeman, this is a bad girl who knew my nephew abroad, and tried to give me the plague. Take the lace from her. It's my lace; I bought it; I gave a hundred and seventy guineas for it. Take it from her: take her into custody. Take Parkes into custody; they are both accomplices."

Beatrice struck her open palm on the packet of bank-notes that lay on the table. "Here," she said, "is the money you paid for that lace. I refuse to sell it to you. It is mine. This room is mine. Leave it."

"You wicked girl; you bold bad hussy! I insist on my lace. You want to sell it to somebody else, because you're found out now. It was worth a great deal more than I gave for it! Oh! you cheat, you; but it won't do. I'll have my rights. Policeman, I bought the lace; get me the lace. Search the place; take this young woman into custody. Why don't you take her when I order you?"

The sergeant of police half smiled. He said in a deprecatory sort of manner: "You see, my lady, if the young woman declines to receive the money, and won't part with the lace, I really don't know how I can act."

"She did receive the money; and the lace was mine, and I will have it! She's a cheat; her father was a cheat before her, and her brother fired at the Queen; and I will have my lace!"

Beatrice looked scornfully up at her: "You selfish, prosperous, cruel woman," she said. "Tyrannize over your own household! this room is mine, humble as it is; it is no place for you. Go away and leave me in peace. The lace will never be yours. I sent it away this morning, and I will never let you have it again."

"Where? where? Policeman, make her say where she has sent it! You wicked toad, I don't believe you! I don't believe it's sent away. You want to wear it, I suppose. You want to dress yourself up in frippery and finery to seduce more young men of good family, and try to get them to admire you, as you did my fool of a nephew. You seem to have had a pretty come down since then! Give me my lace," shouted she, her rage apparently increasing in the dead silence, with which she was permitted to rise; and she made a sort of angry movement in advance, pushing the table at which Beatrice was seated.

"Come, come, my lady, there really must be none of this! Now do pray compose yourself. Your ladyship had better come away;"—and the sergeant of police actually laid his hand on the august and obese arm, whose bracelets quivered with the wearer's passion.

"How dare you touch me, MAN!" gasped the Marchioness. "If you can't do your duty, and take people into custody when you're told to take them, at least don't dare meddle with ME, you impudent stupid."

"Policeman," said Beatrice, "I take you and the lady who is here present to witness, that I return to the Marchioness of Updown the money she sent for the lace she desires to buy, and which I refuse to sell. I can bear no more of this: I have been ill for some time." And so saying, Beatrice vanished into a little bed-closet, from which a tiny staircase led to M. Dumont's workroom below.

The Marchioness positively shook with rage at her disappearance. She stood for a moment her eyes glaring with amazement and anger. Then seizing the bank-notes in the envelope, and turning suddenly on little Miss Parkes, she said, "I discharge you, you vile, you wicked minx! I discharge you. You are discharged! I hope you will starve. I shan't recommend you, I promise you. It's a pity you can't do like your beauty there, and wear lace and coral to make gentlemen fall in love with you. I discharge you, mind! I forbid you to come back. I'll have the doors shut upon you. Any rags you may have left in my house can be packed up and sent to you by Benson; and you don't deserve even that much kindness; nor—only your salary was paid yesterday—you would not get that, you cunning thief, you!"

"Come, come, milady," remonstrated the sergeant. "Really such words are actionable. I'm here to keep the peace, you know. Your ladyship musn't forget yourself this way."

' "You go away, man! I ordered you here—now I order you to go away. I order you away. You've done no good: you haven't got my lace; you let all these low people have the best of it; you won't take people into custody, though you're told ever so; and I don't want you any more. Go away. John! call the carriage. John, do you hear me, or not?" '

The Marchioness returns to her splendid carriage, which had attracted a London mob.

'Into that carriage the baffled tyrant got, and was driven rapidly away, the sergeant of police saying quietly to a brother-constable—after giving vent to his feelings in a low whistle of contempt—"Curious now, ain't it, Brown, how like females are one to t'other? This one's a real marchioness, with a real sort of a marquis, dining with the Queen, and all that, and here she's been a behaving for all the world like Betsy Blane, the fishwoman, as I had in the lock-up last night. She's as like her—as like as one oyster-shell is to another!" and the brother-constable gave a smiling grunt of assent.'

—Lost and Saved, vol iii. p. 20.

Nor does Mrs. Norton fail to make good her place in the modern sensational school, by conceiving scenes in its extremest development. Not only does she give us one peeress, a fish-wife, and another carrying on correspondences which would sink her into lowest infamy, through the medium of advertisements in the Times' second column; but what has been called our Arsenical Literature has been enriched by a very thorough-going scene from her pen. The wicked peeress has, if possible, a more wicked aunt who has mated herself, not without a sense of degradation, to an honest attorney, supercifiously indicated by his titled employers as 'that fellow Grey.' Mrs. Myra Grey shares some of that Hindoo blood, fruitful of intrigue, which gives a wild charm to her niece, and possesses an ivory jewel-hafted dagger with which she opens her husband's letters, and becomes possessed of his client's secrets. On one occasion she betrays knowledge thus surreptitiously obtained, and the consequences threatening to be disagreeable to herself, she proceeds, as though the means were at hand any moment, to poison an inconvenient witness. This is Maurice Lewellyn, the good genius of the story: he sits at her luncheon-table previous to an interview with her husband, but refuses to eat.

"Take at least a glass of wine—let me mix you some sherry and seltzer-water."

He bowed and stretched out his hand for the tumbler, struggling for at least some outward courtesy to this cunning and corrupt woman. She filled it and moved slowly away.

Mr. Grey's youngest boy burst merrily into the room—"I say, papa—where's papa? ain't he coming out this fine Sunday?"

Then seeing the guest, he came up smilingly, and said, "Give me some of your wine for a treat."

"May you?" said Maurice.

"Oh! yes, papa gave me some last Sunday for a treat."

Maurice held the glass to the child's lips. Mrs. Myra Grey was settling some flowers on the mantel-piece: she heard the boy's last words.

"Gave you what?" she said, turning towards them. Then she darted forward, and exclaiming, "Oh my God!" she vehemently seized the child by both arms and drew him back from Lewellyn.

"I beg your pardon," she said, with a strange smile, "but my children never taste wine."

"Oh mamma—last Sunday."

"Come away, you are a naughty riotous boy, and must go upstairs." She led the child away. As she opened the door, Lewellyn heard her say, "Did you swallow any of it? Spit! spit out upon the door-rug;" and the child said, "La! mamma, I had not even got my lips to the glass when you pulled me away."

Lewellyn, who is an acute lawyer, has his suspicions, and in her absence takes out of his pocket an empty flask, and pours into it half the contents of the tumbler. When he gets home he administers the mixture to a dog, which after some hours, dies of convulsions. In the meanwhile, a second guest, Montague Treherne, the betrayer of Beatrice, arrives at the same luncheon-table, and, after angry words with Mrs. Myra, drinks off the remaining contents of the tumbler—a curious thing, by the way, for a very fastidious fine gentleman to do. The lady witnesses the act.

Her eyes were riveted upon the glass in his hand. Her countenance assumed a strange expression of mingled defiance and terror. As he turned angrily from her, and ran down the stairs with the light quick step that was habitual to him, she passed her handkerchief, dipped in water, over her own forehead with a slight shudder.

"BOTH!" she said, in a sort of frightened whisper. "Both! what shall I do?"

'Then rising once more, with a ghastly face, she proceeded carefully to rince the goblet out of which he had drunk, the glass Maurice had used, and the small decanter that stood by them.'

—Lost and Saved, vol. iii. p. 249.

Montague Treherne sails next day in his yacht, is seized with spasms, procures the assistance of a doctor who pronounces it poison, not cholera as the sailors had supposed, and dies. The doctor brings the body to England, and informs Lewellyn of his opinion. Lewellyn has his strong suspicions, which might in fact be certainties, but—

'What end, indeed, could it have served to bring to doubtful trial, and probable acquittal, the wife of the family solicitor? … to disturb with an immense scandal the society in which Montague and his relatives moved; and to receive no guerdon, when all was done, but resentment and reproach from his family?'

—Vol. iii. p. 296.

The murderess, therefore, is let alone, learns caution, and along with all the other bad people of the book, is taken leave of by the reader in unabated prosperity and confirmed social credit and standing. 'The Marchioness is still the person who 'occupies most attention (and most space) at all the balls given 'by royalty and by the subjects of royalty.' And Nelly, in spite of a letter to her angry and malignant aunt, which sounds like an imprudence, is in greater favour with her husband and the world than ever. Beatrice is taken up and restored to society by kind friends, marries an Italian count, not handsome, but with a voice, 'unutterably sad, unutterably sweet,' who has been forsaken by his wife, and the curtain closes on the young mother hanging over the cradle of her baby. For calm, serene, domestic felicity, the very last thing these heroines of many stormy adventures are fit for, is always the haven assigned to them. It is easier, in fact, to turn nun, hospital nurse, or sister of mercy, to take up and carry through the professed vocation of a saint, than to work out the English ideal of wife, mother, and presiding spirit of the house, after any wide departure from custom and decorum; and it is one of the most mischievous points of a bad moral that leads the young and inexperienced reader to suppose otherwise.

If Mrs. Norton attacks apparent and recognised respectability, professes to unmask false pretences, and shows that the worst people are those most in the world's good graces, Miss Braddon, the first and, at present, pre-eminent sensation writer, sets herself to defy and expose the real thing. Her bad people don't pretend only to be good: they are respectable; they really work, nay slave, in the performance of domestic duties and the most accredited of all good works. The moral proper of her stories may be good or bad; as thus,—Lady Audley is wicked, and comes to a bad end; Aurora Floyd does a hundred bad things and prospers in spite of them, both in her own fate and in the reader's favour; but the real influence of everything this lady writes is to depreciate custom, and steady work-of any kind whatever; every action, however creditable, that is not the immediate result of generous impulse. She disbelieves in systematic formal habitual goodness. She owns to a hatred of monotonous habit even in doing right. She declares for what she calls a Bohemian existence. She likes people to be influenced by anything rather than principle and cold duty; in fact, nerves, feeling, excitement, will, and inclination are the sole motive powers of every character she cares for. The person who goes on day after day doing stated duty-work because it is duty, not because she likes it, 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.

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 as duty, not in love; but this is a conspicuous salve, a necessary reservation, which does not seem to us to mean much. Any woman plodding in good works as Olivia does, would produce a shudder and revulsion in such a mind, be she ever so earnest and sincere in her task. And to those outside we grant this sort of life does seem a dull one. Miss Braddon, no doubt, finds abundance of young readers to echo her sentiment, though habit coming upon a sense of usefulness makes such lives more than tolerable, the happiest of all lives to those that live them. In fact, Olivia represents the 'moral man' as familiar to us under the handling of a certain class of preachers, saying prayers, reading the Bible, going three times a day to church:—

'Mrs. Marchmont made an effort to take up her old life, with its dull round of ceaseless duty, its perpetual self-denial. If she had been a Roman Catholic she would have gone to the nearest convent, and prayed to be permitted to take such vows as might soonest set a barrier between herself and the world; she would have spent the long weary days in perpetual ceaseless prayer; she would have worn deeper indentatious upon the stones already hollowed by faithful knees. As it was she made a routine of penance for herself, after her fashion; going long distances on foot to visit her poor when she ought to have ridden in her carriage; courting exposure to rain and foul weather; wearing herself out with unnecessary fatigue, and returning footsore to her desolate home, to fall fainting in the strong arms of her grim attendant 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 images would have haunted her still, vivid and palpable, even in the agony of death….. No good whatever seemed to come of her endeavours, 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 favourites, possessing—

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

She was—

'Devoured by a slow-consuming and perpetual fire. Her mind was like one vast roll 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 remarkable for conformity 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—

'Looked back wonderingly at the dull routine of her boarding-school existence. Could it be possible that it was only a day or two since she was in the Brixton schoolroom hearing the little ones, the obstinate incorrigible little ones, their hateful lessons—their odious, monotonous repetitions of dry facts about William the Conqueror and Buenos 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. A High Church novel, "it is explained," in which the heroine rejected the clerical hero because he did not perform the service according to the Rubric.'—Aurora Floyd, vol. ii. p. 16.

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 favourite a notion it is with writers of fiction. But this clever, bright writer can describe an unattached, vagrant, slipshod existence with touches of truth, with admissions of the necessary condition of such an existence, which give a greater air of reality to her pictures than we often see. Thus, her Eleanor, whose childhood has been passed with a disreputable, self-indulgent spendthrift of a father, with whom she had lived in occasional luxury and habitual destitution, whose companion has been a good-natured, slovenly scene-painter and theatrical supernumerary, who is now, at fifteen, a teacher in a third-rate boarding-school, shows in the following pretty picture nothing at variance with her bringing up. The health and spirits of the solitary girl are exciting the spleen of the sea-sick passengers of the Dieppe steamer:—

'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, the hideous, bilious, revolting three-cornered puffs, which she produced at different stages of the voyage from her shabby carpet-bag. She had an odd volume of a novel, and a long dreary desert of crochet-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 fan-like 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 knowledge 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 those wretched positions which intoxication always chooses for its repose,' as though she had seen so much of it. And it is with people in a scrape, or ready at any moment to fall into one, that she sympathises. Blind passion gets them into difficulties, blind trust carries others along with them; and trust is a quality in wonderful favour with some people, 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.

' "A good husband!" cried John; "not half good enough for her. What can I do to prove that I love her?—what can I do? Nothing—except to let her have her own way. And what a little that seems! Why, if she 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 eyes 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 a 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 the interference of her real husband the groom, whom her father supposes to be dead, and of whom her husband knows nothing. The idolizing father welcomes her to the disturbed and interrupted dinner:—

'Aurora sat in her old place at her father's right hand. In the old girlish days Miss Floyd had never occupied the bottom of the table, but had loved best to sit by that foolishly doting parent, pouring out his wine for him, in defiance of the servants, and doing other loving offices which were deliciously inconvenient to the old man.

'To-day Aurora seemed especially affectionate. That fondly-clinging manner had all its ancient charm to the banker. He put down his glass with a tremulous hand to gaze at his darling child, and was dazzled with her beauty and drunken with the happiness of having her near him.

' "But, my darling," he said by-and-by, "what do you mean by talking about going back to Yorkshire to-morrow?"

' "Nothing, papa, except that I must go," answered Mrs. Mellish, determinedly.

' "But why come, dear, if you could only stop one night?"

' "Because I wanted to see you, dearest father, and talk to you about—about money matters."

' "That's it!" exclaimed John Mellish, with his mouth half full of salmon and lobster sauce, "that's it!—money matters! That's all I can get out of her. She goes out late last night and roams about the garden, and comes in wet through and through, and says she must come to London about money matters. What should she want with money matters? If she wants money, she can have as much as she wants. She shall write the figures and I'll sign the cheque; or she shall have a dozen blank cheques to fill in just as she pleases. What is there upon this earth that I'd refuse her? If she dipped a little too deep and put more money than she could afford upon the bay filly, why doesn't she come to me, instead of bothering you about money matters? You know I said so in the train, Aurora, ever so many times. Why bother your poor papa about it?" '—Aurora Floyd, vol. ii. p. 139.

So far as real life sees, or ever has seen anything like this, it is among the Cleopatras and other witch-like charmers who have misled mankind; not among wives and daughters of repute in Christian or even in heathen times. No doubt discipline, self-restraint, and moral training, stand in the way of this fascination: in every conspicuous example these have all been wanting; still there are people, no doubt, to agree with the sporting community of Doncaster, who, we are told, one and all liked Aurora all the better for 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.

The series of books before us happen to be from female pens, and sensation writing in their hands takes a peculiar hue. Thus with them, love is more exclusively the instrument for producing excitement, and they have the art of infusing greater extravagance of sentiment in its expression. A certain Mr. Fullom has complained bitterly that Miss Braddon has stolen the outline of one of his novels, and has reproduced incident after incident in 'Lady Audley's Secret' with scarcely the affectation of disguise; the real bitterness of the transaction lying no doubt in the fact that his precursory tale had been too little read for the plagiarism to be known to any but the two authors. The successful appropriation of another's plot no doubt shows that quality of prompt assimilation attributed to Aurora, 'who was such a brilliant creature, that every little smattering of knowledge she possessed appeared to such good account, as to make her seem an adept in any subject of which she spoke.' This is no doubt a power of the feminine nature, to take in at a glance, and to make apparently her own, what has cost hard labour to slower, though original, thinkers. Probably nobody could read Mr. Fullom's book; we do not pretend to have heard of it, but he makes out an excellent case, which just proves Miss Braddon's dramatic power. Play wrights take anybody's story—it belongs to them to make it fit for the stage; and the world is essentially a stage to Miss Braddon, and all the men and women, the wives, the lovers, the villains, the sea-captains, the victims, the tragically jealous, the haters, the avengers, merely players. We could extract pages, fit, as they stand, for the different actors in a melodrama, vehemently and outrageously unnatural, but with a certain harmony which prevents one part exposing the other.

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