Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/180

168 hangs such a tale; or, once more, the shipwreck scene, and the deathbed of Patrick Lillie, and the return home of the honourably acquitted exile—all examples of vigorous and effective writing, which few can read unmoved, The occasional introduction of a sentence or two of simple pathos is effectively and artlessly managed. We might quote a century of examples—take one, at random, where Jean Miller tells how she met Patrick Lillie coming out of the wood where lay the dead man, and was struck by the extremity of his anguish:—"'and ye didna speak to him?' said Jacky.—'Speak to him! Lassie, if ye havena a lighter weird than ither folk, ye'll ken before lang, that sore trouble is not to be spoken to. I wad rather gang into a king's chamber unbidden than put mysel forrit, when I wasna needed, into the heavy presence of grief.'—'For grief is a king, too,' murmured Jacky.—'And so it is,' said Jean Miller, with another emphatic quiver of her lip—the little narrow Edinburgh attic, in which her student-nephew toiled, or ought to toil, rising before her eyes, and her heart yearning over him in unutterable agontes of tenderness,—'and so it is—and kenning that there's sin in ane ye like weel, or fearing that there's sin in ane whose purity is the last hope of your heart, that's the king of a' griefs.'"

Among such a crowd of characters as have their exits and their entrances in "Merkland," it is quite reasonable that two or three should but indifferently please us. We are sorry to put Lilie, Norman's pretty daughter, on the list, because the author has taken pains on the outfit, and readers generally accept her as a little darling; whereas we confess to a disrelish for her rather hackneyed and melo-dramatic dialect—her mystic vocables—her too sophisticated infantine-cy, and her habit (chiefly recognised at the minor theatres) of using the third for the first person singular. Of the leading male characters, hardly one is to our fancy, to say nothing of the tiresome Mr. Fitzherbert, and the plastic Giles Sympelton; we stumble a little at the quick and perfect conversion of Archibald Sutherland, nor is there that probability in the prolonged secrecy of Patrick Lillie, which Mr. Hawthorne has so powerfully contrived in the case of Arthur Dimmesdale: it is surely on the author's behoof that Patrick, being such as she depicts him, endures such a burden, of shame and sorrow for eighteen weary years. Lewis Ross we should like to forbid the house had we a little sister Alice; and the mention of her name induces us forthwith to turn from captiousness to panegyric. If the men of "Merkland," as we have complained, are wanting, more or less, in the propria guæ maribus, and suggest a female hand as their originator, the women, young and old, are rich in faith and good works, and are for the most part clear-headed and leal-hearted, tender and true. Alice Aytoun is a sweet picture of a girl just emerging from the child's mirth and unrestrained gaiety into those sensitive, imaginative years, which form the threshhold of graver life—and a touching chapter in her history is that wherein she is told that Lewis—her Lewis—is the brother of her father's assassin, when, with a long, low cry of pain involuntary and unconscious, she turns from Mrs. Catherine's lap, feeling that there is nothing more to say or to hope, and the mist and film of her first sorrow blinds and stills the girlish heart,