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in a way which would in a former generation have led to the ducking-stool, and in these more complaisant days would at least have prevented his having the pleasure of detaining her any longer in his presence or of welcoming her in the future. The lover, although a man of capacity and a Member of the House of Commons (a most henpecked assembly in the eyes of lady novelists), is without any apparent mission in life but to ride under her chariot wheels, bears her objurgations with exemplary meekness, and is scornfully dismissed. Finally, when the young lady returns to her senses, she sends him off to a table at the other end of the room, on which is a slip of paper whereon she has written a word or two of explanation and a gracious permission to renew his engagement, whereat he is serenely delighted and jubilantly thankful. The young lady has it all her own way, in a fashion which seems remarkably attractive to lady novelists. The explanation is that he is a candidate for future conjugal endearments, and will submit to anything so long as a shadow of hope remains. Even while she is rating his grandfather, "what absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed." Contrast this imbecile sentiment with a real wooing between a real man and woman in real life. William the Conqueror, to take an extreme case in an

opposite direction, was confronted by some nonsensical shilly-shally, to which Mrs Ward attributes importance. He did not trouble himself about his Matilda's hair or whether he dared touch it, or soothe her. He rolled her over and over in the mud. And Matilda, convinced by his procedure that he meant business and was a man of mettle, submissively yielded. Mrs Ward's notion of the divine flame is that of damp straw smouldering in a dog-kennel; and her notion of masculine character is crude, involving the negation of every particle of virile force.

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The book before us is conceived in much the same spirit as its predecessor, but the relations described are mostly after marriage. There is no attempt to bring its incidents, or those relations, into formity with common-sense or actual experience. It describes a whirl of social excitement, a distressing matrimonial relation, together with some of the meanest vices unrelieved by virtues of any kind, except those which are, or seem to be, assigned to characters too feeble and insignificant to influence the fortunes of any one of the dramatis personœ.

There is nothing very elaborate in the plot. The hero is, as is usual in these cases, a Member of the House of Commons. He adds to that the dignity of Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, is of great personal and family_influence, eventually becomes Home Secretary, and is marked out as a

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future Premier. He is a sceptic governed career, without a soul enormously interested in to stop it or guide it; kicking ligion, an aristocrat enormous- violently over the traces from ly interested in liberty. "To the very first; rushing in six have the reputation of an idler years, from eighteen to twentyand to be in truth a plodding four, to absolute destruction, and unwearied student,-this worn out in mind and body at any rate pleased him." For by incessant and insane excitethe rest, he is careless, good- ment. Tolstoy makes one of tempered, without a touch of his characters say that "all sava indignatio, whatever the the variety, all the charm, all circumstances; ready to let the the beauty of life, is made up whole reins of management, as of light and shadow." In this far as home life or even the book there is a complete abinfluence of his home on his sence of light and shade, and public career is concerned, slip only the fuliginous lampblack from his fingers. He is of less of the shilling dreadful. Yet account than the lady's-maid, the heroine interests and abwho can at any time adminis- sorbs the attention, a result ter the sedative of a month's which is a striking tribute to notice. He accordingly fulfils Mrs Ward's talents as a novelMrs Ward's idea of masculine ist, but does not in our judgdignity. It is an impossible ment render the book either character. He has married a wholesome or agreeable. She self-willed child, scarcely more was a wild cat at school, she than half his age, out of a said; do you know why? "Bewretched home, given her cause some of the other girls wealth and high social posi- were more important than Ition, and surrounded her with much more important and everything, including his own richer and more beautiful, and love, that she most values. people paid them more attention. Yet he is represented as a And that seemed to burn the mere log of wood in regard heart in me." She described to her, and is sedulously de- to the hero, before his infatuprived of all control, or even ated love-making, that her one influence, over the successive aim was "to be envied, pointed situations which arise, in a at, obeyed when I lift my manner which one feels instinc- finger, and then to come to tively does not correspond with some some great, glorious, tragic real life or with any possible end," and obligingly added that matrimonial relations. she would "never look at a man who did not think it the glory of his life to win me." The accommodating hero is so absorbed in watching the flashing of her face and eyes, the play of the wind in her hair, and the springing grace with which she moved, that his one

The heroine is far and away the best drawn character in the book. In real life, for her own good and for the peace and quiet of all concerned, she would have been placed under severe restraint. In fiction she pursues an unmanageable, un

idea of the future is, Poor child! what is to be done with her? The poor child settled that for herself. She married him, led him a life of torment to which he tamely submitted without loss of affection, finally went off, as was quite appropriate in the circumstances, with another man, and died in misery and comparative want. In one of the constantly recurring crises of her short matrimonial career-for even in a novel you can't stand more than six years of this sort of thing, in real life probably much less-she had the satisfaction of reminding her husband that she had warned him. "I remember saying to you that sometimes my brain was on fire. I seem to be always in a hurry-in a desperate, desperate hurry! to know or feel something-while there is still time-before one dies. There is always a passion, always an effort. More life, more life, even if it lead to pain and agony and tears."

The novelist can easily dispense with any effort to remove in a reasonable manner the difficulties in the way of a wholly ill-assorted and improbable engagement. Credit the man with infatuated philandering propensities and a desire to protect, and the problem is solved. In this case, however, the obstacles are overwhelming. Mr Ashe, the hero, held an unassailable position-wealthy, of high rank, the heir to a peerage, an assured ascendancy in public. The heroine, Lady Kitty Bristol, comes of a thoroughly bad stock, with

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mother whose career has been all that it should not be, and who has to be pensioned by the enthusiastic husband. But the hero is so satisfied with his position, wealth, and family, that he concludes that "society must accept his wife; and Kitty, once mellowed by happiness and praise, might live, laugh, and rattle as she pleased." The provoking cause of the disastrous engagement, made by a mature statesman of thirty-two with a girl of eighteen, was that whilst in а "very ecstasy of resolve" at his window in the dead of the night, a flower, weighted by a stone tied into a fold of ribbon, fell beside him, thrown from outside. He stole down the staircase, made for an ilex avenue, caught the young lady, and was then and there engaged, meeting all warnings with the sage remark, "I should be bored with the domestic dove. I want the hawk, Kitty, with its quick wings and its daring, bright eyes." He got more than he wanted. The hawk had its own destructive way from first to last; and Lady Caroline Lamb herself is at last eclipsed.

The marvellous incident was that amongst the warnings addressed to him she threatened him with overpowering fancies which she must follow, and admitted that she had one at the time for а certain Geoffrey Cliffe, with whom, after an insane career, she finally elopes. This man, a fascinating journalist, a poet whose poems we are not

allowed to sample, and an excellent candidate for the gallows, balked of his legitimate end by the retributive hand of a paid assassin, is early introduced on the scene. It is not a very well-drawn character, for from first to last it is difficult to understand the source of his magnetic influence. The authoress refers it to his poems, which excited in Kitty a "passion of the imagination." He had passed through, she says, a wealth of tragic circumstance, and had been face to face with his own soul in the wilds of the earthwhatever that may mean. The poems must have been remarkable productions, since in spite of having outraged the Nonconformist conscience to an extent which cost him an election, he exercised, possibly with their aid, as much fascination over the orthodox young lady of the piece, Mary Lyster, as over the heroine herself. Miss Lyster does not receive fair play at the hands of the authoress. She plays a distinguished part in the plot, and is a social success, estimable in all her relations. But she offers sincere homage to the respectabilities, and is accordingly pursued with rancour all through the book. She is introduced on page 1 as devoted to a fine piece of church embroidery, designed for her by Burne-Jones; was marked out first as Mr Ashe's intended wife, only to be triumphantly displaced by Lady Kitty; and second as Mr Cliffe's intended wife, again to be displaced by the superior attrac

tions of the heroine, this time brought to bear upon her intended and intending husband out of sheer malignity. At the end of the book this eminently respectable young lady, regardless of her church embroidery, is credited with an act of diabolical wickednessa treacherous betrayal of Lady Kitty into Cliffe's power at the very moment when, with a returning sense of right, she is endeavouring to escape from his influence back to her lawful husband. This incident, however sensational, is impossible on the face of it. No one could possibly descend to such a depth of infamy unless the whole previous life had led up to it, and had been consistently base.

Cliffe's eventual triumph over Lady Kitty's virtue is not entirely due to his poems. Here we come upon another ghastly incident. Cliffe had been abroad for some years, and his relations with the heroine had subsided, and instead a friendship or attachment had grown up with Mary Lyster. No sooner had our heroine observed this, than "Could she carry him off?" occurred to her. "Her vanity insisted that Mary could not prevent it." The deterrent reflection followed, "I am a little beast; why shouldn't she be happy?" but overhearing some disparaging remarks made upon her by the young lady, she determined on vengeance, and forthwith began a wild flirtation which, after some engrossing vicissitudes, ended in her ruin and

Cliffe's assassination. No one can dispute the ability with which the character of the heroine is drawn. There is the love for her husband combined with incessant acts of unrestrained vanity, necessarily blighting his political career, so far as it was intertwined with, or dependent upon, his social or matrimonial life. There are occasional gleams of right feeling for both husband and child, continually darkened by morbid promptings and impulses which no one interferes to check. The scandal of her proceedings only leads her to reflect, "I began this to punish Mary, and now when I don't see Geoffrey, everything is odious and dreary. I can't care for anything." But the result is that Cliffe knows that she has designedly broken off his marriage with Mary Lyster, that he had vainly endeavoured to resist her spell, "a fatal fusion of their two natures" had come about, and retreat was impossible. His reflection was, They still had the last justifying cards in their hands: passion, and the courage to go where passion leads. When these were played, they might look each other and the world in the face. Till then they were but triflers, mean souls, fit neither for heaven nor hell." Can anything be more unwholesome and unpleasant? The sequel eventually involves a twofold breach of the decalogue, very inartistic, and with none of the alleviations which might vindicate Burke's oversanguine estimate that vice

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loses half its evil by losing all its grossness. One impatiently recalls Mrs Sarah Grand's expedient of tilting her characters into a river, in the new light of a stroke of genius. It would be less commonplace, it would afford equal scope for courage to the parties concerned, and it would be admirably adapted to assuage their justifying passions. But to But to our authoress aliter visum. Meanwhile the husband, his mother, and family are represented as standing idly by, each urging the other to do something, each perfectly helpless, until the scandal has reached such dimensions that Lady Kitty's withdrawal to the country becomes imperative.

We need not follow up the incidents of this sequestered life. Cliffe is abroad, and the Prime Minister is royally entertained, with Lady Kitty as hostess. His white eyelashes were an object of intense dislike to her, and his refusal to be drawn in regard to political secrets roused the latent insanity in her, and scenes ensued which the husband must have regarded as disastrous, though the effect of them on the mind of an old statesman and man of the world, who knew well the sort of person he was dealing with, seems to us grievously exaggerated. However, those incidents, as well as the visit to Venice, where the redoubtable villain of the piece, the fascinating Cliffe, again appears on the scene, must be read in the book. The sequestered life ends with a mad

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