Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/310

Rh sarcasm. Considerable pains the limner has evidently bestowed on Hiram Yorke, who doubtless had his prototype in substantial Yorkshire flesh and blood—a man difficult to lead, and impossible to drive—rude yet real originality marked in every lineament, and latent in every furrow of his unaristocratic visage. The analysis of his mental and moral frame is masterly; but, although he is the very last man whom one expects to see totus, teres atque rotundus, there is a something too little, or too much, in the subsequent presentment of him: he seems to rave occasioned doubt what to do with him, how to make so angular a personage dovetail with the story. His family circle is also, we suppose, taken from* life, and a crotchety crew are they. The pages devoted to them and their eccentric ways are, to our taste, the least pleasing part of the work. Mr. Helstone is capitally done: a conscientious, hard-headed, hard-handed, brave, stern, implacable, faithful little man—unsympathising, ungentle, prejudiced, and rigid—but true to principle, honourable, sagacious, sincere. A clerical Cossack, who ought to have donned a red coat, and not a black one. We have all of us seen the man in actual life, with his upright port, his broad shoulders, his hawk's head, beak, and eye; we have all heard the direct, outspoken, unpoetical sentences of the man, uttered in that unmodulated, rasping voice. His bewilderment when woman's heart is on the tapis, is felicitously rendered when women are sensible, intelligible, hr can get on with them, but their vague, superfine sensations put him sadly about. As he says in his invalid niece's chamber, when she pleases him by asking for a little bit of supper, "Let a woman ask me to give her an edible or a wearable, be the same a roc's egg or the breastplate of Aaron, a share of St. John's locusts and honey or the leathern girdle about his loins, I can, at least, understand the demand; but when they pine for they know not what—sympathy, sentiment, some of these indefinite abstractions—I can't do it; I don't know it; I haven't got it." Agreeable in company, he is stern and silent at home. As he puts away his cane and shovel-hat in the rectory-hall, so he locks his liveliness in his bookcase and study-desk; the knitted brow and brief word for the fireside; the smile, the jest, the witty sally for society. Nothing can be more true to life than this highly-finished portrait. The three curates, again, are racily hit off, with a dash of burlesque, but no special transgression of probability. The Irishman, Peter Malone, athletic, noisy, pugnacious—a cross of bear and baboon; the cockney, Donne, propping up his rickety dignity with a stilted self-complacency and half-sullen phlegm—an arrogant, insipid slip of the common-place; and little Sweeting, the ladies' man, who has the repute, with certain fair parishioners (not of the Shirley sort), of playing the flute and singing hymns like a seraph, and who is so handy and agreeable in a case of tea and turn out. Of the subordinate female characters, Hortense Moore, in.her striped cotton camisole and curl papers, is cleverly sketched; and there are genial touches about Miss Ainley, which attract charitable regards towards that mild, meek spinster, that worshipper of the clergy, who, in her pure, sincere enthusiasm, looks upon the very curates (Malone and Co.) as sucking saints; albeit they, in their trivial arrogance, are unworthy to tie the good soul's patten-strings, or carry her cotton umbrella or her check woollen shawl. Joe Scott and William Farren deserve a good word; and one reverend gentleman there is whom it is possible to revere, in the person of Cyril Hall.