Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/336

322 this novel would make far more stirring tracts for Exeter Hall missions, than the homilies and controversial appeals usually sanctioned by a May-meeting committee. For instance, the Jesuit's exposition of the casuistry of mental reservation to Everard Digby, or Grace Vaux's "assisting" at the martyr-procession to the stake, or the tuition of Robert Catesby's children in hatred of "that wicked queen" Elizabeth, and that "gruff-looking fat man," that "dreadful wicked heretic, Luther," by their grim, gaunt granddam.

A less questionable success was that of "Norman's Bridge," a tale of a modern Midas and his gains and his heirs—expanded, as in the case of "Ravenscliffe," over too large a surface of time—but ingeniously ordered, admirably peopled, and strikingly, though perhaps too abruptly, wound up. And then came "Angela," another able fiction, with an indifferent conclusion—a book one must like, for the sake of its "bright particular star"—but which proportionably vexes its admirers by its occasional defiance of probability in plot, and good taste in style. When an author creates a sterling character, it is natural he should love to introduce him anew in successive tales, although the experiment is not without its hazards: this experiment Mrs. Marsh prosperously essayed in "Angela," and on a more systematic scale in her next brace of novels, "The Wilmingtons," and "Time, the Avenger." Henry Wilmington's sacrifice of moral principle and self-respect to distorted notions of filial duty, which forms the point d'appui of the interest in the former tale, is only too characteristic of this writer's exegesis of the fifth commandment. Be her "private interpretation" right or wrong, she expounds it in parables hard to bear, and which excite remonstrances on the ground both of ethics and of art. In "Time, the Avenger," she indulges her whim of showing crabbed elderly manhood in love—a whim that lately threatened to be the rage with our Lady Novelists. Mr. Danby, in "Emilia Wyndham," was not to be exclusively sui generis; Mr. Craiglethorpe, sarcastic, severe, forbidding, is similarly "trotted out" to show his paces with a fair rider on his haughty back—much to the encouragement of time-stricken, musty, desponding bachelors; for if thus

It must be allowed, however, on the other hand, that few of her sisterhood surpass Mrs. Marsh in the delineation of a youthful lover of the beau idéal order as to age, presence, manners, head, and heart—almost fit to pair off with the bright damosels whom she never tires of creating, nor we of deifying among the penates of our bookshelves.

But the lofty sphere even of omnipotent criticism has its horizon, and finds space an obstinate entity, whatever the Kantian philosophy may discourse. So, of Mrs. Marsh’s other novels, "Mordaunt Hall," "Lettice Arnold," &c., si quæ alia, the less that we now say the better. Not indeed as regards her or them, but as regards ourselves, reader—and you.