Works by Mrs. Oliphant

we may judge from the publishers' advertising lists and from the critical columns of the reviews, there is at this moment a sensible decline in the power of Women's Novels, an indication that the feminine genius of this generation has touched its highwater mark, and that the ebb has begun. No general vote of popularity has exalted any young authoress into sudden fame and fortune for some years past. We who remember the acclaim that greeted 'Currer Bell' and 'George Eliot,' listen in vain for any thrill of the same universal voice. Mr. Thackeray's daughter has draped his mantle very gracefully on her shoulders, but she requires a cultivated taste for her due appreciation, and a cultivated taste is not the taste of the majority; Miss Braddon keeps up her name and multiplies her editions, but her clients are of the lower intellectual order. In default, therefore, of any new star of the first magnitude in the literary firmament, we are truly thankful for the favourite old luminaries who rose above the horizon twenty years since, and still go on mildly shining over the waste of literary waters that heave and rock all round this restless and reforming age; and for none are we more thankful than for Mrs. Oliphant, perhaps, the fullest, steadiest light of them all.

The Macaulays of posterity, if there be any gratitude in them, will surely avow themselves indebted to this generation for the mass of solid, reliable, social history embodied in its novels. Supposing a case:—Should the Church of England, as a State religion, not see the century out—an eventuality we could not affect to deplore—the clerical annals of Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Mrs. Oliphant will be of some service. As long as any library preserves a copy of them, it will be difficult to assert, without risk of contradiction, that it fell by the corruption of its parish clergy; from amongst them came the Puritans of Elizabeth's and James's days, the Nonconformists of the Restoration Period, and the Methodists of the Georgian Era; leaving in the Church, it cannot be honestly denied, with many of a different character, as good livers and as pious divines as themselves, who were yet sincerely attached to its constitution.

Most of us can admit, now that we are far enough away and safe from the fires of Roman bigotry, that the Roman monks and missionaries did some excellent work; so, possibly, when the old Church of England is gone, and the generations to come review it in the living pictures of these nineteenth century novelists, they may feel that its past is worthy of much respect. The poet and the imaginative writer of Nonconformity, the Milton and the Defoe of this generation, have yet to arise; and surely in the ancient trials and persecutions of Nonconformists and in their present life there are true elements of poetry for talent to combine. In 'Rufus Lyon,' George Eliot has done justice to a somewhat eccentric type of Nonconformist minister, but the majority of the best-known sketches of Nonconformity, lay or clerical, are mere caricatures by persons who know it only from the outside. For a true and sympathetic view of modern life amongst Dissenters, we want a writer born and bred in dissent, and with that endowment of genius which is the gift of God. We shall give him a warm welcome when he appears; and the world beyond us will, no doubt, give him a warm welcome too.

Mrs. Oliphant manifests a lively interest in every system of ecclesiasticism with which she is acquainted; and, as she expound their various developments in common life, she makes her readers share this interest. She wishes us perfectly to understand that she does not consider Christianity to be the exclusive property of any sect; in her philosophy, one religious profession is as good as another, and she preaches her principles of tolerance from this text in some of the cleverest novels that the language boasts. She is a very prolific writer, and her method has naturally undergone modifications; we will not say that her tone has changed, but it has certainly relaxed; and is now just so much easier than at first as the South is softer than the North. It was with a distinctly serious intent that she portrayed, many years ago, the Scotch minister in his manse, in both poverty and riches, prosperous in quiet days, and then involved in the dissensions of the kirk to the loss of his living; but since she left the bracing air of moor and moss, and settled down in the good society of Carlingford, within a pleasant distance of London, where most people are 'brought up in the old-fashioned orthodox way of having a great respect for religion and as little to do with it as possible,' she has gradually acquired more and more of the airs and manners of Carlingford, and has learnt to indulge in a vein of sarcasm when talking of the clergy which is no doubt extremely entertaining to light-minded persons, but to the serious is gravely reprehensible. In this vein she gives us an Archdeacon of the Broad Type; Rectors High Low, and Negative in their views: a Perpetual Curate responsible only to his Bishop, and a poor Curate, with a poor spirit to match, responsible to his Rector's wife; and more incisively than any of these, she limns a Nonconformist preacher, a young genius fresh from Homerton, writhing in the alternate embraces and clutches of his flock, and his low-bred friend who, casually occupying his pulpit, makes 'an' it,' and ultimately supersedes him in his office of pastor to the delightful Carlingford 'connection' worshipping at Salem Chapel.

It will be seen that Mrs. Oliphant's clerical portraits are numerous, and we allow that they are well done. Nor will we complain that there is no very pure or lofty spirit amongst them—no Curate Crawley, or Rufus Lyon. She knows her own strength best when she refrains her pen from the highest humanity. Her picture-gallery is full of every-day people—a crowd of them—but they all please us more or less from their likeness to the people we know. As an artist she is akin to Miss Austen, but much more diffuse. She makes us smile often, but she very rarely moves us to tears, either by her pathos or her tragedy, for she encumbers both with too many words. She describes everything with precision, and by the time we have done with the piled-up anguish, we are too familiar with it, and too weary for sympathy. This is a fault, but when an artist gives us such fair pictures of middle-class life, in fair flowing English, we are more than contented, though they may not bear the sign-manual of genius.

It is curious to observe to what opposite styles of fiction the term Novel is applied. What a gulf lies between 'Lady Audley' and 'Mrs. Margaret Maitland,' for instance; yet non-discriminators, whose principle it is to distrust and denounce all fiction, shake their wise heads at them both as common 'Three-volume Novels,' blindly classing them in the same category; though the first is a resuscitation of the notorious poisoner Brinvilliers, enacting a series of modern crimes, and the second is a beautiful sermon in action on pure and holy living. These perverse lovers of mere facts are now, however, an insignificant and daily decreasing minority. This is a reading generation. and it must have literary provender of one sort or another. The store of old facts is necessarily limited, and the supply of new ones is not enough for its needs; besides, many old facts are worn threadbare, and not all are valuable or wholesome; indeed, we think that some real lives would be better forgotten, and many events that have happened would be as well lost in the mists of antiquity. The magazines are so numerous now that they are hard put to it for materials to fill their pages, and an industrious collector for one of those most deservedly popular, gave us lately a nightmare of murders as 'Old Stories Retold.' They are true—they are undeniable facts; nevertheless, we are distinctly of opinion that the most sensational of blood-and-thunder romances would be infinitely less likely to prove harmful than are these cold, elaborate details of cruelties done and suffered for by men and women whose names enjoy the 'ghastly celebrity of the 'Newgate Calendar.'

We are, therefore, ready to maintain, at the point of the critical pen, that novels are necessary: that a good novel is a good thing: that a poor novel is better than the dressing up, gala-fashion, of old iniquities: and that the veriest failure of a novel is less vexatious than a bad biography, or than any history that pretends to be true, and falls short of its subject. Our own preference inclines to the sunshiny view of life in fiction, though we do not object to tragedy now and then, nor even to a chapter from the dark side of morals, if it be painted with a firm, stern touch. But the cynical novel we like not, be it ever so clever—the novel that casts into immortal types the baser metal of humanity, and photographs into permanent blackness the transient suggestions of evil that come and go on the mind of the million; for we can never separate from the art of a book its influence; and many simple stories of simple life, told without pretension, are rich in 'those grains of hidden manna, those sweet and wholesome thoughts which nourish the soul, and refresh it when it is weary.'

Such a book is the first work of Mrs. Oliphant: 'Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland of Sunnyside, written by Herself:' a book that charmed and soothed us when we were young, and which we can read over still on summer days and winter nights with undiminished satisfaction. Mrs. Margaret Maitland is no echo and no wraith, but a real living woman, set in the midst of the loving, hoping, fearing, stirring little world of a Scotch rural parish. The place in our regard that dear old lady of Sunnyside originally achieved she keeps, and we think of her always as a person whom we have known. Her story is very simple, but her way of telling it is delightful; and when, after the lapse of a few years, she takes up the thread of it again, and in 'Lilliesleaf' relates the married trials of 'the dear bairns' whose early days are the brightest passages in her own life, we take it up with her, and listen to the story as if it concerned personal friends of our own from whom we have been severed for a while.

It is a great merit in a writer when she can thus compel us to realize her characters, and it is a power that Mrs. Oliphant possesses in a very high degree. These two books, 'Mrs. Margaret Maitland' and 'Lilliesleaf,' should be read consecutively. The personal experiences of Mrs. Margaret Maitland are not told in detail until she is 'an eldern person,' left alone in the quiet, pretty cottage of Sunnyside, to which she and her mother have betaken themselves on the death of the minister, her father. She has had her griefs of heart, but they are over, and God has comforted her; we get occasional glimpses of them, and very bitter they are, but the main story is that of her brother's children, Claud and Mary, at the manse of Pasture Lands, and of Grace, a little lassie,whom 'she brings up at Sunnyside in simple, pious ways, quite unwitting that her charge is a rich heiress. In her sweet bright maidenhood Grace is reclaimed by her selfish father, and put under the care of fashionable Mrs. Lennox, his sister, to be mysteriously suppressed, and, if possible, bullied out of her inheritance of Oakenshaw, which is derived from her ill-used mother. Grace, however, bears a high spirit, and having discovered the truth about herself, she calmly resists her persecutors. We are very indifferent to this part of her adventures. She is much more at home at Sunnyside than in Edinburgh; and her heart being given to Claud Maitland before she is carried away, she returns eventually in triumph, having defeated wicked father, bad aunt, and foolish suitor, with her guardian's commands not to quit Suunyside again at any one's bidding but his; and who should this guardian (a sarcastic old bachelor) be, but the lost love of Mrs. Margaret Maitland! Between Claud and Grace there are no difficulties but such as true love makes light of, and soon overcomes; but between Mary and Allan Elphinstone of Lilliesleaf there are weighty obstructions, doubts, fears, and sorrows of his own causing, and which we know will have their sequel when the two are married, and the first series of the Sunnyside Chronicle ends.

During the interval that elapses before Mrs. Margaret Maitland again takes up her pen the clouds have begun to gather visibly about the house of Lilliesleaf; and that she has a prescience of them is clear, from the saddened strain in which she resumes her narrative.

At sight of the young generation, of 'Miss Mary's' four darlings, 'Miss Marget' catches some of her old servant's cheerful and wise philosophy. Was there ever a sweeter picture than this, though you see the shadow of an invisible trouble in the background of it?

There is heartache in the story of 'Lilliesleaf,' but not heartbreak, for love abides still between the one who strays away and those who stand fast by duty, and justifies itself as the greatest power for good that God has given to his creatures, by bringing the prodigal home to his own roof and people in final repentance, forgiveness, and peace.

There is a changeful legend of young love woven into the serious warp and woof of the married lives at Oakenshaw, which brightens and relieves the book. The heroine of it is Rhoda, Grace's half-sister, who has lived concealed from her for seventeen ears, and is then abruptly thrown upon her charity by their unprincipled father. There is a streak of genius in Rhoda, but she is a wilful passionate girl, who hates her dependence, and tells her long-suffering entertainers that she would rather work with the reapers in the fields than live at ease in their fine house, and eat their bitter bread. Her lover is a match for her in pride, discontent, and temper, and though they both mend a little, and have a considerable fund of perverse affection between them, when they are finally married and quit the happy walls of Oakenshaw, with ambitious hopes and projects of getting on in the world, we have no desire to follow their fortunes. Soon after this event Mrs. Margaret Maitland takes her leave of us, being now old, and stricken in years. All is well at last; at Lilliesleaf and at Oakenshaw are great quiet and peace of heart. The labour of the elder generation prospers at the good bidding of the Lord, and 'the light of His countenance has brightened upon the path of all the bairns.'

Mrs. Oliphant is far too voluminous a writer to permit us to treat all her works in detail. We must in the majority of cases content ourselves with a passing allusion, and devote our space to the consideration of those novels by which her fame is, we trust, secured beyond this generation. 'Merkland' was her second story, and the scenery is Scotch again, as it is also in 'Harry Muir,' 'The Laird of Norlaw,' and 'Adam Graeme of Mossgray'; but in 'The House on the Moor' she has crossed the Border, and written a story as eerie and dreary as a sunless day on the fells in November. It is not a pleasant book. The bad people fill far more than their fair share of the stage, and they are dismal and uninteresting, and the misery amongst them is as all-pervading as an east-wind. The germ of the story is an iniquitous will, by which a man, with cunning spite against his son, leaves all his large possessions to accumulate in the hands of trustees until the said son's death, when they are immediately to devolve upon his grandson—a fine opportunity indeed, for the devil to set the evil passions of father and child to work! The authoress lets the Old Enemy avail himself of it to his heart's content. He has it entirely his own way; neither resists him, neither shows fight for an hour. Meaner, uglier domestic scenes than pass in 'The House on the Moor' were never drawn. The disinherited father allows his son to grow up an utter cub, ignorant of his future. and a companion of village ale-house popularity. The two are of the same thoroughly bad and sour nature, and hatred, malice, and uncharitableness thrive between them as such ill-weeds will in a congenial soil. Only by grace of Susan, the daughter, do we ever get a gleam of sunshine throughout the ignoble tragedy. We shall not transcribe any of its scenes; it is a good situation wasted, which might have been put to excellent profit, if the authoress had but taken it up in her sweeter vein, and shown the victims of the old man's wicked device, resisting the devil with the natural affection and confidence of their kinship, instead of giving place to him at his first assault; and it would have been, so far as our judgment goes, a truer story, and certainly a pleasanter and more healthy story to study.

It is, however, by 'The Chronicles of Carlingford' that Mrs. Oliphant will most probably live and amuse her grandchildren to the third and fourth generation. They were published originally in 'Blackwood's Magazine,' and in their collected form fill nine substantial volumes. They are capital studies of country-town life in our own times; and Carlingford has by their means become a much more real place to hundreds of readers than half the chief cities and celebrated places on the railway map.

Reversing the order of the 'Chronicles,' we shall first review the career of 'Miss Majoribanks,' the public-spirited young lady who created this famous good society of Carlingford. Before her time it was a mere chaos of scattered and unapplied materials, like many another spot which remains to this hour dull as Tadmor-in-the-Wilderness, for want of an organizer like her. She is infinitely more loveable and admirable than heroines of novels in general, and though we are meant to laugh at her good-humoredly throughout her trials and triumphs, we never lose sight of her honourable, liberal, serviceable qualities, or waver in our allegiance and liking.Mrs. Oliphant displays in this story an excess of that shrewd humour in which Lucilla Majoribanks is so gloriously deficient, and she becomes now and then as sarcastic as Mrs. Woodburn, who was the terror of Carlingford society when Lucilla was forming it. There is, indeed, a strong touch of caricature in several of her delineations in the 'Chronicles,' but even in the most exaggerated, the natural features are preserved. Every character is distinct as life, and their variety is as wonderful as life. But their portraits are laboured at. There is no question of etching or sketching with Mrs. Oliphant; she draws her faces and figures by line and rule, and paints every bit of them with minutest care. She takes nearly a score of lines to describe Miss Majoribank's hair, and nearly a dozen to show us her hands and feet. Perhaps it is not too much for so useful and remarkable a young woman; and there we have her at last, complete and rounded, thoroughly capable of the mission before her—a large girl, full and well-developed at fifteen, with a face that might ripen into beauty and become grandiose, and a mass of tawny hair that curled to exasperation. She lost her mother at this date, and would fain have remained at home to be 'a comfort to her dear papa,' but Dr. Majoribanks found himself so well able to dispense with her consolations (having his practice and an excellent old cook to see to his little dinners) that he sent Lucilla back to school for three years,and then to travel another year abroad, by which time she was a finished gentlewoman, and there could no longer be any pretence for keeping her away from the sphere which she was destined to revolutionize and enlighten, Like a judicious girl, she timed her journey to arrive at home by the train that reached Carlingford at half-past five, and the scene in which her coming is announced to Nancy, the important functionary who had hitherto ruled over the widowed establishment of Dr. Majoribanks, is a capital introduction for these leading personages in Lucilla's story.

Dr. Majoribanks' confidence was not misplaced. Lucilla was even cleverer than he supposed, and the way in which she took her proper place in the house is excellently told. 'The young sovereign gave no intimation of her future policy;' but the morning after her arrival, she usurped her father's place in front of the urn and tea-pot with such amiable ingenuousness, that the old Doctor only said 'Humph,' and abdicated. When Nancy came in and saw what was done, she stared aghast, and though she did not, perhaps, see the joke of it so clearly as her master, she was dethroned with the same consummate tact and grace to which he had succumbed. Her domestic rule initiated, Lucilla in the course of the day walked serenely forth to view the country she had come to conquer. We are informed that the social condition of the town at her advent was deplorable. 'There was nothing that could properly be called a centre. To be sure, Grange Lane was inhabited, as at present, by the best families in Carlingford; but then, without organization, what good does it do tu have a lot of people together?' Mr. Berry, the evangelical rector, was utterly unqualified to take any lead; his wife was dead, his daughters were married, and his maiden sister, who kept his house, asked people to tea-parties where the Dissenting minister, Mr. Tufton, was to be met, and other Dissenters, small tradesmen, to whom the rector, in his universal benevolence, held out the right hand of fellowship. Dr. Majoribanks gave only dinners, to which naturally, while there was no lady in the house, ladies could not be invited; and, besides, he was rather a drawback than a benefit to society, since he filled the men with such expectations in the way of cookery, that they were never content with a good family dinner after. Then the ladies, from whom something might justly have been expected in the way of making society pleasant, were incapacitated either by character or by multiplicity of children. Mrs. Centum was too busy in her nursery; Mrs. Woodburn liked nothing so well as to read novels, and 'take off' her neighbours when anybody called on her; Mrs. Chiley was old and hated trouble, and her husband, the colonel, could not enjoy his dinner if he had more than four people to help him to eat it; in short, you might have gone over Grange Lane, house by house, finding a great deal of capital material, but without encountering a single individual capable of making anything out of it.

This master-hand was now come in the person of Miss Majoribanks.

We have not words to express our admiration of Lucilla's social strategy. Would that she were multiplied a thousandfold, that women in her likeness might rise everywhere and pioneer a way through the density and obstruction of provincial dulness! On her very first walk abroad, with the luck that attends the brave, she heard resounding from the plebeian side of Grove-street, three doors from Salem Chapel, a magnificent contralto voice, which she knew would go charmingly with her own; the voice of an old schoolfellow, of Barbara Lake, the eldest daughter of Lake, the drawing-master. Instantaneously there germinated in her brain the rudiments of those Evenings by which society in Carlingford was disciplined to its present perfection. Lucilla was not one to be limited by the canons of gentility. The Lakes were not 'in society,' but Barbara's voice was a glorious compensation for the want of birth and money, and Lucilla at once determined to make it available for her purposes of civilization. She publicly resolved, and avowed her resolution to remain ten years at home 'to be a comfort to her dear papa;' and the way in which she put aside a looming obstacle in the shape of her cousin Tom, who had the sense to wish to appropriate her, is exquisitely humorous. She persuaded her father to re-furnish her drawing-room with pale green to suit her rosy complexion, and as a prelude to bringing everybody together on the first of her immortal Thursday evenings, she presided at one of the Doctor's little dinners, supported by old Mrs. Chiley. It could not have been more successful had she been in harness a dozen years.

After this good beginning, people naturally grew excited about the Evenings. They wanted to see the renovated drawing-room, and in their curiosity frankly forgave Lucilla for being in advance of their provincial notions. 'Don't expect any regular invitation,' she had said. 'I hope you will all come, or as many of you as can. Papa has always some men to dinner with him that day, you know, and it is so dreadfully slow for me with a heap of men. That is why I fixed on Thursday. I want you to come every week, so it would be absurd to send an invitation; and remember it is not a party, only an evening.' Nearly the whole action of this story is transacted at these Thursday evenings, which soon become an institution in Carlingford. Love and love-making, and divers other complications occur, but we shall not attempt to unravel them, as they are only subsidiary to Lucilla's noble work of social regeneration. Like other conquerors, Miss Majoribanks was destined to build her victory on sacrifice; but she was always equal to her duty, and great alike in failure as in success. She was never seen to flinch at difficulty, and from some passages of arms out of which other women would have emerged with a sense of ignominious defeat, she came with flying colours, and with never so much as a scratch on her shield. Mr. Cavendish had began to pay attention to her in what Mrs. Chiley thought a marked way, but at the very first evening appeared on the scene the powerful syren, Barbara Lake, with her rich contralto, her splendid eyes and striking figure, and captivated the man of surface refinement. Lucilla patronized them, and when they married, dismissed them with her blessing. General Travers, who was produced in Carlingford specially to admire her, neglected her ample charms, and admired instead the sweet and rosy little face of Barbara's sister Rose, who designed patterns and had a tender feeling for art; but Lucilla was judicially calm on the occasion, and when Archdeacon Beverley, who really promised well for a while, was suddenly rapt away by his old and only love, whom he discovered living under Lucilla's generous protection, she smoothed the way to their reconciliation, and feasted her own heart on the pleasant thought of 'Cousin Tom,' who had always appreciated her. We should feel, indeed, as Mrs. Chiley did, that these accidents were rather hard upon her, if we had not a comforting presentiment that Lucilla is all the time saving up for her cousin Tom, and that he is sure to come at the proper moment and carry her off.

Amongst Mrs. Oliphant's many clever caricatures, Archdeacon Beverley is one of the cleverest. She informs us that he was Broad Church, and had a way of talking on many subjects which alarmed his hostess, Mrs. Chiley.

The contrast of this gentleman's liberal theories with his dogmatic manner is very amusing, and so is the consternation of all right-thinking people, when it is confidently reported that the Rector had invited Mr. Tufton, of Salem Chapel, to meet the Archdeacon, and that, but for the Dissenting minister's good sense, that unseemly conjunction would have taken place. And here our authoress condescends to, or at least paints, the unworthy and insulting commonplace of modern journalism, that the Dissenter must necessarily belong to a lower caste of society—a blunder from which her own associations ought to have kept her. The encounter of the Rector and Archdeacon at Dr. Majoribanks' table verges on the comic. Mrs. Oliphant represents the evangelical clergy as peculiarly fond of good living. The disagreeable curate always turns up at the Rector's house ten minutes before dinner, when there is a certain excellent pudding, and Mr. Bury is said to have had a way of sneering at 'the flesh,' while sparing no pains to nourish it, which provokes Dr. Majoribanks into launching at his spiritual ruler a shaft of medical wit.

The second of the 'Carlingford Chronicles,' in order of time, recounts the wooing and wedding of Dr. Ryder, the purchaser of the practice of Dr. Majoribanks, whose sudden death in embarrassed circumstances is skilfully made use of by the authoress to bring out in a new light the genuine goodness and affectionateness of his daughter. If any reader wishes to know what manner of woman succeeded Lucilla in her charming drawing-room, when she retired from Carlingford on her marriage, to the family estate of Marchbank, they will find Mr. Ryder's prenuptial life and adventures most entertainingly set forth under the title of 'The Doctor's Family,' and then, for information as to how Carlingford society maintained itself after its fair reformer went to carry light and progress into the society of the country, we must refer them to the stories of the a eae of 'The Rector' who succeeded Mr. Bury, of 'The Perpetual Curate' of St. Roque's, and of the minister of 'Salem Chapel.'

There is some capital writing in 'The Rector,' which opens with a sketch of Carlingford, and introduces the successor of Mr. Bury in the course of a morning call on one of the pleasantest families in Grange Lane—the family of Mr. Wodehouse. The scene, which is as effective as a good drawing in water colours, is in the garden—the warm, well-furnished garden, where high brick walls, all clothed with fruit-trees, shut in an enclosure of which there was not a morsel, except the velvet grass, with its nests of daisies, which was not under the highest and most careful cultivation. Tall plumes of lilac and stray branches of apple-blossom gave friendly salutations over the walls to the world without; within, the sweet summer snow dropt on the bright head of Lucy Wodehouse, and impertinently flecked the Rev. Frank Wentworth's Anglican coat. She was twenty, pretty, blue-eyed, and full of dimples, with a Leghorn hat and blue ribbons; she had great gardening gloves on, and the grass at her feet was strewn with the sweetest spring blossoms,—narcissus, lilies, hyacinths, gold ranunculus globes, and sober wallflower. He was the perpetual curate of St. Roque's, and there was that indefinable harmony in their looks which prompts to the bystander the suggestion of 'a handsome couple.' On a green bench under the great May-tree sat the elder Miss Wodehouse, who was pious and leisurely, and verging on forty; and not far off shone the bright English house all beaming with open doors and windows. On this charming domestic out-of-door scene entered, by the door in the wall, Mr. Wodehouse, 'a man who creaked universally:' introducing the new rector, Mr. Proctor, fifteen years Fellow of All Souls', who, on his own confession, knew very little about ladies, and had brought down to the rectory, in lieu of a wife, only a dear old shrewd lively mother whom he longed to compensate for her tedious dull life so many years without him. Their brief housekeeping together is very prettily told; but Mr. Proctor is not happy in his strange position; fifteen years of college seclusion do not prove to have been a good apprenticeship for parish work, and after a signal failure or two, feeling his incompetence keenly, he makes up his mind to return to All Souls', and leave his rectory to Morgan, the next fellow on the list, who wants to get married. We meet him again in the history of 'The Perpetual Curate,' a kind and honourable man whom we like, and are glad to take final leave of in pleasant circumstances.

The Rev. Frank Wentworth and Lucy Wodehouse play hero and heroine in, the next 'Chronicle;' but there are several groups of subsidiary characters, each with a central interest, not always essential to the development of the story-in-chief, which often drags, and would have been more effective for pruning, or careful compression. It begins with the arrival of Mr. Morgan and his wife—a couple who have waited to be married until the bloom is off both their lives, and who experience a slight flavour of disappointment with each other in consequence. They are 'two fresh, new, active, clergymanly intellects, entirely open to the affairs of the town, intent upon general information and sound management;' and it seems a highly doubtful business whether Mr. Wentworth and Mr. Morgan will find Carlingford big enough to hold them both. They do not, and how and why not is the pith of the whole 'Chronicle.'

Mrs. Oliphant drops into her shrewdest satiric vein the moment she mentions the middle-aged rector and his middle-aged wife, The grievance of the former is Mr. Wentworth's activity in a certain low district of the town which in strictness does not belong to his chapelry of St. Roque; the vexation of the latter is the drawing-room carpet of Mr. Proctor's choosing—a carpet strewn with gorgeous bouquets, which only high Christian principle enables the poor lady to endure. Their characters are well studied up to a certain point; that of Mrs. Morgan is good throughout, but in her husband the darker shades are much exaggerated. His prejudice against the perpetual curate is the root of all the mischief in the story. It begins with their earliest acquaintance, when the rector, who naturally loves the 'constituted authority' that is vested in himself, finds a sisterhood in grey cloaks, a provident society, and all sorts of things going on in his parish under Mr. Wentworth's direction; even an impromptu chapel, which he mistakes at first sight for a little Bethel, where the curate has two week-day services, and a Sunday evening service for the bargemen of Wharfside. Mr. Morgan makes up his mind that the young Anglican must be taught to know better than to interfere in another man's parish; and in the process of teaching he allows the enmity in his heart to expand into active persecution. We cannot but think that here Mrs. Oliphant's lively satiric fancy carries her out of the bounds of probability. We believe that she libels common human nature in the remarkable story of how the hard-working and deservedly-popular curate becomes all at once the most suspected and despised of men. It is a proverb, that 'a good man's character swears for him;' yet this good Mr. Wentworth, who is a gentleman by birth and education, and a Christian in principle and life, on what seems to us the most preposterously inadequate evidence, is supposed to be guilty of folly and sin, which, if proved against him, would deprive him of his gown. We can conceive nothing more glaringly absurd and disagreeable than this portion of the 'Chronicles.' The character of a minister of God is delicate as a woman's, and ought not to be breathed upon. What should we expect to take place in 'the world' if a clergyman whom we had always seen active in his duty, pure in his life, refined in his habits, were wildly accused of removing from her home and secreting a pretty little coquettish miss, his clerk's niece, on the strength of her having been seen haunting his lodgings, and once conducted home by him after dark, and given by to her guardians with a sharp admonition? In real life, we believe that the accusation would never be made, or if made by vulgar and credited by silly persons, would be strongly repudiated by every man and woman blessed with a grain of common sense. But what does Mrs. Oliphant represent as the probable course of action in such a community as Carlingford? She represents Mr. Wentworth as almost universally condemned! Rose Elsworthy vanishes, and her uncle, accompanied by another tradesman, impudently assails him as her abductor; Sarah, the maid-of-all-work at his lodgings, thinks that perhaps, after all, Mr. Elsworthy may be right; Mrs. Hadwin, the widow lady under whose roof he had lived ever since he came to St. Roque's, grows troubled with contemptuous pity for the poor young man; but it never occurs to her that his good sense and pride and superior cultivation may have been sufficient defence against little Rose's dimples and blue eyes; his Aunt Dora, who has known and loved him from boyhood, quite coincides in Mrs. Hadwin's fears and sentiments; Dr. Majoribanks, meeting him on his way to a dying bed, prayer-book in hand, remarks to his colleague, Dr. Ryder, 'I confess that, after all, there are cases in which written prayers are a sort of security'; Mr. Leeson, the odious curate who is fond of All Souls' pudding, hears the tale, swallows it greedily, and promptly reports it to Mr. Morgan; Mr. Morgan is only too glad to credit the worst—he even sees the hand of Providence in it for the humiliation of his popular rival; the poor folk of Wharfside, to whom he had done nothing but good, eye him askance; a trio of pious old evangelical maids are ready to testify against him with personal witness;even his sweet Lucy does not stand by him as a true lover should;—indeed, the only people who reject the vulgar slander imperatively, as it deserves, are the bad or unpleasant people of the story:—Mr. Wentworth's reprobate brother Jack, his disagreeable Aunt Leonora, and Mrs. Morgan; and their behaviour on the occasion redeems all their little naughtinesses and asperities. The scandal being countenanced by so many respectable persons, becomes the common town's talk, and at length necessitates a semi-public inquiry into the curate's life and conversation. Of course, the reader, who knows all along that he is innocent, expects him to come out of the investigation triumphantly, and so he does; while shame and confusion descend like a cloud on the rector, the parish clerk, and the shabby scoundrel who is Rosy's real deluder. Lucy's eyes brighten again on her persecuted lover, and though he loses the family living of Skelmersdale, because his views are not precisely the same as those of his ultra-evangelical Aunt Leonora (one of the three partronesses), Mrs. Oliphant, who has no morbid taste for narrow circumstances, does not set the wedding-bells a-ringing until she has put her hero in the way of affording to her heroine all the comforts and enough of the luxuries of life to make them happy in the marriage-state, and to enable them to keep up a position in the very best Carlingford society. With a fine stroke of her good-humoured irony, she puts the moral of her story into the mouth of the reprobate Jack, whose airs of penitence are most assuming and delusive while they last.

This Aunt Leonora is an admirably-drawn character, and with fewer traits of exaggeration than Mrs. Oliphant usually gives to those whom she depicts as wise and pious in their own conceits. Every religious community has its Aunt Leonora—its feminine pope;and probably the sketch of this lady's state of mind after her reprobate nephew's harangue, has delighted and comforted thousands who have suffered under such a yoke as hers. We give it as a good specimen of Mrs. Oliphant's serio-sarcastic vein.

And there we will leave her to salutary humiliation and repentance.

It will be seen that there is much amusing reading in the 'Chronicles' that we have already reviewed; but it is to 'Salem Chapel' that we should accord the palm for most laughable entertainment. When it first came out in the pages of 'Maga' it was a revelation to its staunch old torified Church and State readers, which delighted them infinitely. We are all apt to imagine that our own words and ways, being perfectly familiar to ourselves, must needs be so to the world at large. But this is a signal mistake. Church-folk, born and bred in the Church, are (or rather were) for the most part, as ignorant of the customs of Noncomformity at home as of the customs of the Mahometans; and to the excitement of reading a good story was therefore added the pleasure of surveying a piquant and exaggerated caricature of a social and religious state of things in the midst of us of which they were previously unaware. It is so cleverly done, that being published anonymously, the chapel portions of the story raised a general suspicion that the author of it was that greatest genius amongst living women, George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant surpasses herself here, or the subject inspires her with a humour as rare as it is real. The tragedy of the tale is, as usual with her, far too long drawn out; and it is always a relief to escape from the woes of Mrs. Hilyard to the society of Mr. Vincent's chapel friends.

According to the latest information, Salem Chapel is still the only dissenting place of worship in Carlingford, where there are no Dissenters above the rank of the milkman or the grocer. It is a small red brick building, on the shabby side of Grove Street, 'presenting a pinched gable, terminated by a curious little belfry, not intended for any bell, and looking not unlike a handle to lift up the edifice by to public observation.' Its chronicle is contemporary, or nearly so, with the story of 'The Perpetual Curate,' and opens with the retirement of Mr. Tufton and the ' call' of Mr. Vincent, ' fresh from Homerton, in the bloom of hope and intellectualism, a young man of the newest school,' who was almost as particular as Mr. Wentworth, of St. Roque's, about the cut of his coat.and the precision of his costume, and decidedly preferred the word clergyman to the word minister. He had been brought up upon the 'Nonconformist' and the 'Electic Review,'and believed that the Church Establishment, though outwardly prosperous, was a profoundly rotten institution; that the eyes of the world were upon the Dissenters as the real party of progress; and (greatest delusion of all) that his own eloquence and the Voluntary principle were quite enough to counterbalance all the ecclesiastical advantages on the other side, and make for himself a position of the highest influence in his new sphere. How the eyes of the young enthusiast were opened to the indifference of Society to a Dissenting ministers, and the intolerable bondage of his position as pastor of Salem Chapel, is the main interest of the 'Chronicle.'

Mrs. Oliphant has given a loose rein to her liveliest powers of satire in this story, and Dissenters have laughed as much as other readers at the exaggerated fun of her caricatures. There are, undoubtedly, busybodies and small social tyrants, pests of ministers' lives, in all little communities, and—and patronesses of the most signal unpleasantness. There are literates in the Church, now-a-days, whose offences against grammar quite equal those of the 'young man from Homerton,' from whose taking discourse the letter h was conspicuously absent. But is it right or fair to hold up the vulgar literate as a specimen of the Church of England curate furnished by the Universities, or the conceited Dissenting preacher, with his defect of speech, as a specimen of the men whom Homerton, under its learned President, Dr. Pye Smith, sent out, after a six years' training, into the Congregational ministry? It is as preposterous as it is unfair. With a more accurate knowledge of the class she was describing, Mrs. Oliphant would have made her portraits of Dissenting ministers more faithful and also more effective.

The new minister is the son of a minister, who has no private means, and whose mother and sister live in humble obscurity at Ashford. In his first flush of confidence, he has blissful ambitious dreams, which even Mr. Tozer, the butterman, and the other chapel managers cannot dissipate. He imagines the aristocratic doors of George Lane flying open to welcome him, and the dormant minds of the dwellers in those serene places rousing up at the fire of his eloquence. He is handsome, has talent, and is 'well educated and enlightened in his fashion,' 'but entirely ignorant of any world' except the narrow one in which he had been brought up. He comes to Carlingford with elevated expectations of getting into its highest sphere, as his natural place; but his first invitation is to tea at Mrs. Tozer's, at six o'clock, where he meets the leading chapel members, and has the pleasure of hearing their views.of a pastor's duty. The scene is so admirable that we shall quote it—not at length, but in those passages where the peculiarities of the company are most naïvely displayed. We are apprized that to go out to tea at six was a wonderful cold plunge for the young man, who had been looking forward to Mr. Wodehouse's capital dinners and the charming breakfasts of the pretty Lady Western; but he smiled over the note of invitation written by Phœbe, the butterman's daughter, and went in a patronizing frame of mind, expecting quite a pleasant study of manners amongst the good homely people. And in that he was not disappointed.

The visit of the young minister to the old man he had superseded is as admirable as Mrs. Tozer's tea-party. Mr. Tufton strikes us as quite the proper type of pastor for such a flock. His counsel to his ambitious, ardent successor is excellent. We almost hear him speak as he raises his fat forefinger and slowly shakes it. 'Be careful, my dear brother;you must keep well with your deacons, you must not take up prejudices against them. Dear Tozer is a man of a thousand—a man of a thousand! Dear Tozer, if you listen to him, will keep you out of trouble. The trouble he takes and the money he spends for Salem Chapel is, mark my words, unknown—and,' added the old pastor, awfully syllabling the long word in his solemn bass, 'in-con-ceiv-able.' Adelaide Tufton, the minister's daughter, a dreadful shrewd invalid, like a malign parrot, predicts that Mr. Vincent will not last out two years under the chapel managers, and when we hear the much-lauded Mr. Tozer aspiring to rule in the pulpit as well as in the vestry, we begin to agree with her. 'I'm very partial to your style, Mr. Vincent,' said the deacon; 'there's just one thing I'd like to observe, sir, if you'll excuse me. I'd give 'em a coorse; there's nothing takes like a coorse in our connection. Whether it's on a chapter or a book of scripture, or on a perticklar doctrine, I'd make a point of giving 'em a coorse if it was me. There was Mr. Bailey, of Parson's Green, as was so popular before he married—he had a historical coorse in the evenings, and a coorse upon the eighth of Romans in the morning; and it was astonishing to see how they took....' The deacon's version of this poor minister's dismissal is a caution for Mr. Vincent, who asks the reason why of his going. Tozer shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. 'All along of the women: they didn't like his wife; and my own opinion is he fell off dreadful.... and the managers found the chapel falling off, and a deputation waited on him; and to be sure he saw it his duty to go.'

The young minister follows the butterman's advice about the 'coorse,' and soon fills the chapel to overflowing; but he suffers his heart to go madly astray after that 'bright particular star' of the highest Carlingford society, Lady Western, and that is an irretrievable blunder. There is something ludicrous as well as painful in his passion, which brings him nothing but mortification and grief. The enthusiasm of pretty Phœbe Tozer and her compeers is lost on him,and general discontent in the connection results. The flock rebels, and when the pastor falls into trouble, falls away from him—all but Tozer, that 'man of a thousand,' and his family. These improbable events and others, not connected with the chapel business, but mixed in with it by the dexterous art of the story-teller, bring on the scene one of the best characters in the book—Vincent's proud, brave, discreet little mother. But the crisis is past her management, and her discretion and valour avail only to secure for her son a dignified retreat from Carlingford. Disappointed in his love, disgusted with his vocation, he determines to resign his pastorate, and in his farewell oration to his flock he sums up the opinions of Nonconformity, which are all his brief experience has left him.

'A Church of the Future, an ideal corporation, grand and primitive, shone before his eyes, as it shines before so many; but in the meantime the Nonconformist went into literature, as was natural, and was, it was believed in Carlingford, the founder of the “Philosophical Review,” that new organ of public opinion.' The golden vision of the enthusiastic young minister, what is it but the grand old medieval theory born again? A church free above the world and universal—and so in the round of ages extremes meet, the earth swings on, but human nature never changes, and there is no new thing under the sun.

Our remarks on the famous 'Chronicles of Carlingford' have run out to so great a length that we must sum up briefly what we have to say about the writer's other works. We regret this the less because Mrs. Oliphant does not provoke to much variety of criticism. When we have said that her English is good, her method diffuse, her sarcastic vein excellent, her moral tone unimpeachable, we have said almost all there is to say of her style. It is not so strongly characterized that we can ever declare with certainty on taking up a new story in 'Blackwood' that it is hers or not hers. By the time we have read half way through if we are no longer in doubt, but she has not the individuality by which we can assert at once, 'This is Mrs. Oliphant's—her mark.'

Some years before the 'Chronicles' there appeared in 'Blackwood's a charming group of shorter stories of which we retain the pleasantest recollections; of these 'Katie Stewart,' and 'The Quiet Heart' were the chief. 'Zaidée,' and 'The Athelings' were amongst Mrs. Oliphant's earlier pictures of English society, and amongst her most recent are 'Madonna Mary,' and 'Agnes,' both tales of sorrow. In 'A Son of the Soil,' she goes back to Scottish ground and her most serious vein; and in the 'Brownlows,' her last published work, we detect a slight flavour of Carlingford.

Besides her novels by which she is most widely known, Mrs. Oliphant has written a 'Life of Irving,' which deserves a permanent place amongst the biographies of national worthies. We will not do it so ill a service as to treat of it at the fag end of an article; we will but quote the criticism of a shrewd old woman of the cottage class, who having read leisurely through it from the first word to the last, remarked: “That's a real good book, and very interesting;” and then wiping her spectacles, moved her mark backwards and added, “I'll read it over again.” It will indeed bear reading over again many times, and in a cheaper form would, we think, achieve the popularity it certainly merits.