RECENT FICTION.*

Mr. Froude's "The Two Chiefs of Dunboy" is a striking historical novel with a great deal of substantial truth in the disguise of fiction. Perhaps we should not say disguise, after all; for in many of the chapters it is avowedly the historian, and not the romancer, who speaks. The scene is laid in the middle of the last cen

tury, upon the southwest coast of Ireland, being occasionally shifted to the home of an exiled Irishman engaged in shipbuilding and commerce at Nantes. The two principal and strongly contrasted characters are Colonel Goring, an English revenue officer at Dunboy, and Morty Sullivan, a soldier of fortune and Irish "patriot" of the type equally familiar in those days and in our own. That there was some excuse for the existence of this sort of patriotism a hundred years ago, Mr. Froude would himself be the last to deny; and he is unsparing in his denunciation of the foolish laws imposed by the English Parliament upon the commerce and internal economy of the sister island. But he is equally unsparing in his portrayal of the lawless Irish character, with its deep-seated prejudices and its unreasoning hatred of England; and the reader's sympathies go, as they should, with the stern Cromwellian English officer in his feud with the Irish privateer. The result is a double tragedy, the Englishman falling a victim to the treachery of his opponent, and the latter meeting his just deserts at the hands of the English soldiers. As a novel, the work is vigorous, and

well planned; as a historical and social picture, it deserves very high praise. Especially fine is its delineation of the vacillating and pusillanimous English policy toward Ireland, so unlike English policy in general and so untrue to the long line of its best traditions.

A better historical novel than Mr. Froude's is "Micah Clarke," by Mr. A. Conan Doyle. The actual title of the book fills some score of lines on the title-page, being descriptive, after the old-fashioned style affected by the writer throughout, of the subject matter of the work. It is more to our present purpose to say briefly that the story is of the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, than to quote a title whose prolixity indicates the principal fault of the

text that follows. The narrative is in the first person, the narrator being a young hero of Roundhead stock, whose father sends him forth to do battle against Popery and King James. In spite of its great length, the story really presents a vivid historical picture of the causes which led to the uprising in support of Monmouth, and of the progress of that movement up to its final suppression with the battle of Sedgemoor and the bloody execution done upon the rebels by the infamous Jeffreys. The author reminds us a little of Scott, and a good deal of Blackmore. The type of militant dissenting preacher, which Scott pictured with such richness and penetration in "Old Mortality" and elsewhere, is very well imitated by Mr. Doyle in his picture of the Puritan leaders of Monmouth's army. On the other hand, such a type as the old sea-captain Solomon Sprent, if his language is a little too ingeniously nautical at times, is very like the similar figures in Blackmore's novels; and the style of Micah Clarke," although not nearly so picturesque, suggestive, or rhythmical, often makes one think of the style of "Lorna Doone." On the whole, the story is healthy and robust in tone, and of absorbing interest for both young and old.

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Mr. Julian Corbett's "Kophetua the Thirteenth" is a decidedly odd romance. To free himself from the ordinary limitations of the novelist, the writer has invented a country and a people for his story, taking care to exterminate the latter after they have served his purpose. Of course there is a beggar-maid in the story, and the hero himself is a lineal descendant of the ballad-famed Kophetua. The narrative must be characterized as ingeniously dull, having neither practical nor utopian human interest.

"An Author's Love" is a work of fiction none the less for pretending to be true. Whether Mérimée's "Lettres à une Inconnue ' were real letters, written to a real woman, is still one of the open questions of literature; but no reader of these pretended replies to those letters will have any doubt of their imaginary character, whatever may be his theory of the work which made so considerable a posthumous addition to the reputation of the brilliant Frenchman. It is only by contrast that the replies set off the brilliancy of the originals; and it is difficult to think of Mérimée as fascinated, for a long term of years, with anyone who could write him in the rather stiff and affected style of these epistles.

"A little judicious levity" is the word of "The Wrong Box," a delightful story that Mr. Stevenson and his youthful collaborator Mr. Osbourne have provided for our summer reading. We assume, at least, that Mr. Osbourne is youthful, for the preface says that one of the authors is old enough to be ashamed of himself, and the other young enough to learn better. The former of these two propositions obviously refers to Mr. Stevenson, and the latter is thus left for his fellow-worker. The story is so consistently improbable, and is so entirely without a purpose, that it has quite the charm of one of the "New Arabian Nights," which amounts to saying that it is worth a whole wilderness of Jekylls and Hydes. It is one of those books that, once begun, cannot possibly be laid down until the last leaf is reluctantly turned. As for the story, we cannot begin to outline that; and among the characters, can only find space to record a special liking for the portentous bore who is the unconscious cause of all the complications, and for his sporting nephew whose opinions of literature are expressed far less frequently than we could wish. One of those opinions concerning "The Athenæum

we must quote :

"It had a name like one of those spots that Uncle Joseph used to hold forth at, and it was all full of the most awful swipes about poetry and the use of the globes. It was the kind of thing that nobody could read out of a lunatic asylum. The Athenæum, that was the name! Golly, what a paper!"

Mr. Crawford's "Greifenstein" is a story which illustrates the old moral precept that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. Finally, however, the characters of the younger generation are permitted to escape what must be regarded as the logical consequences of their parents' acts, upon the some

what questionable plea that they, after all, are not responsible for what other people have done. That the story is weakened by this, there can be no doubt. From the start, it is logically bound to develop into a full-proportioned tragedy; but this due development is checked midway by a resort to somewhat casuistical devices, and, the older generation having expiated its guilt in conventionally tragic fashion, the younger generation is permitted to live and enjoy itself. Apart from this structural defect, the plot is constructed and the action carried out with really remarkable skill, except near the close, where a wholly unnecessary complication is introduced in the passion of Rex for Greifenstein's wife. In this respect, the denouement is nearly as absurd as that of Goethe's "Stella" in its original form. Nothing is more remarkable about this novel than the manner in which Mr. Crawford has assimilated the German romantic style, and given a distinctly Northern atmosphere to his story. The observant cosmopolitan appears here as elsewhere in the author's work, and accounts for such features as the strikingly clear and interesting account of the "Korps life of a German university town. To be sure, this matter is one that hardly has a place in the novel; but it is extremely well put and very interesting.

Professor's Hardy's "Passe Rose" is an exquisite piece of literature, but it has no more hold upon the facts of actual life than one of the Grimm Brothers' Marechen. Fairyland, or, at least, the land of mediæval romance, is the real home of the figures in this story of the days of Charlemagne. We can hardly look upon them as creatures of flesh and blood like ourselves, or upon their emotions as those of prosaic mankind. prosaic mankind. This matter of standpoint clearly understood, the reader who is prepared to give himself up to the poetical imaginings of the writer may be prepared to enjoy himself rarely. Guy of Tours, the Prince Charming of the tale; Passe Rose, the warm-blooded Provençal maiden; the great King himself, and the men and women of his court, are all creations of a singularly vivid imagination, and all inhabit, with peculiar fitness, their realm of fable. Descriptions of the kind which it is fashionable to call "word-pictures" abound in these pages, being very acceptable. And all together, scenes and figures and passions, have a very genuine though subtle charm for minds weary of realism and glad to breathe for a while the lighter and purer air of fancy.

In "The Open Door," Miss Howard has worked upon a larger canvas than usual. The result is a combination of strength and weakness, the strength being, on the whole, the more apparent. The countess is so exaggerated a type of silly egotism as to be unreal and consequently ineffective, and there is a great deal too much said about her pet dog

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Mousey." On the other hand, we have in Gabrielle a fine picture of the young girl of healthy instincts and sincere nature, and in Count Hugo a strong and natural portrayal of suffering. For the hero of the story is a young man cut off in the prime of manhood from most of the pleasures of life by a fall from his horse, which leaves him a hopeless cripple. As for "the open door," that is the phrase with which Epictetus reminds us that if life become intolerable there is a way out of it, and that if we do not take it we have no reason for complaint. Our hero thinks seriOur hero thinks seriously of accepting the stoic solution of the problem, but hesitates before the final step. By his hesitation he is lost-or saved as the reader may please; for the horizon of life, at first, after the shock, so irremediably narrowed for him, broadens again as his sympathies learn to embrace other sufferings than his own, and love comes finally to light up his gloomy existence, and make happiness a possibility

for him.

In all that concerns the history and the relations of these two-Count Hugo and Gabrielle the story is sweet, pathetic, and true. The rest of it may be allowed for the sake of contrast, and in the lighter miscellaneous passages there are many touches of keen characterization and of suggestive humor. The style is mostly good, although we have noticed a few lapses from correct English. We do not doubt that the book will find a warm welcome, and few novels of the season have as much to recommend them.

Mr. Robert Timsol's "An Alien from the Commonwealth" is an odd sort of book, and an interesting one. It tells the story of an "unpractical" young man, thrown upon his own resources, after receiving a good education, and anything but fitted for the competitive conditions of American money-getting life. He is successively a lawyer, teacher, and journalist, and comes finally into an unexpected fortune - an incident which rather mars than helps the story. The character of the hero seems to be too fine for even the writer to fully appreciate, and resort seems to be had to the millionaire uncle by way of atonement for the rough world's

way of dealing with a sensitive and refined nature. We are inclined to think that the moral would have been better without this adjunct. The satisfaction of living up to one's own ideals is, or ought to be, a sufficient substitute for the gross material satisfaction that most men are aiming at; and we even fear that our hero's unexpected luck may have done him little real good. The author of this book is evidently a young man, with a taste for forcible rather than elegant forms of expression, and a considerable sense of humor. We judge that his experience with the race of publishers has embittered him towards that useful section of the community, for his descriptions of their doings, as typefied by the firm of Lybert and Company, is in a vein of the wildest burlesque. Perhaps, however, we should not credit wholly to the writer the opinion of the cynical hack who figures largely in the latter half of the story. Whether truthful or not, these opinions are the most amusing things in the volume, as the following exhortation to the hero will exemplify:

"Take me for a warning, if you will: I've borne a share in the guilt and in the punishment. It's a painful subject, but long ago I wrote several books, and I've wrong direction to one's mind. It's a bad thing to be never recovered from the effects. It gives a fatally mixed up with literature at all, even as we are, in this comparatively useful way of warding off inflictions from the public. If we had not taken the itch, though in this

modified form, we might have come to some good end, in soap, or stocks, or salt fish, or boots and shoes. You needn't smile, my poor young friend; if you've not learned your lesson yet, you will in time. Do you think even Lybert is happy? No, sir. True, he's made near a million, but he sees others who began at the same time and went into something really necessary to the welfare of mankind, such as whiskey, or tobacco, or Wall Street, or explosive compounds, and are now worth ten times as much. No, in his heart he's not content with the book trade."

Mr. Boyesen's "Vagabond Tales" are seven in number, and have already seen the light in various periodicals. They deal with the Norseman at home and in America, and generally tell of his falling in love, leaving a suggested vista of coming happiness before the eye at the close. To this there are one or two exceptions, the endings in these cases being as pathetic as one could wish. Mr. Boyesen repeats himself a good deal in his types, but every story has a peculiar freshness of its own, notwithstanding the repetition. In this respect, he reminds us strongly, mutatis mutandis, of Mr. Bret Harte, and his delineations of Western life.

"A Venetian Study in Black and White, by Charles Edward Barns, is a delirious work of fiction from whose incoherent mass the

threads of a moderately intelligible romance may be picked out with the exercise of some patience. The style of its writer is unlike anything outside such literature as Bedlam may be supposed to possess. A rather pretty titlepage and generally attractive bookmaking constitute the only claims of the work upon the reader's attention. Mr. Barns seems to be a genius hitherto unknown to fame, and has now put forth, in addition to the extraordinary book above mentioned, several other volumes of equally eccentric prose and verse.

A new volume of farces by Mr. Howells includes "The Garroters," "Five O'Clock Tea," "The Mouse-Trap," and "A Likely Story." They are in the writer's most playful vein, and in them we find a large share of the humor which seems to have departed from his later novels. Of course the characters in these little parlor comedies do nothing in particular, but they talk in a most natural and amusing way, and get into moral entanglements quite as mirthprovoking, in their way, as those grosser and more physical entanglements which the farce, as properly understood, has for its object to cre

ate.

We cannot say much for the illustrations of this volume, all but one or two of them being distressingly bad.

Still another volume of these farces, issued by a rival publishing house, makes its appearance at the same time. This includes "The Parlor Car," "The Sleeping Car," "The Register," and "The Elevator." On the whole, this volume is the more amusing of the two. Mr. Howells was newer at the work when these comedies were written, and they have the ring of a more unforced humor. In fact, we know of nothing in Mr. Howells's work more irresistibly comical than the story of the Californian in "The Sleeping Car."

WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE.

BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS.

AT the birth of Richard Jefferies, the rural deities must surely have presided; for the secrets of meadow, wood, and stream were an open book to him. The collection made by his widow of his latest essays published under the title of Field and Hedgerow" (Longmans)— amply justifies Mr. Besant's recent " Eulogy " of the author. It is pleasant, in a day of critical scholarship and overmuch learned threshing of straw, to meet with a writer who leads us once more to nature out-ofdoors for to read Jefferies is almost as good as a ramble in the woods and fields that he knew so well.

upon him.

From the smell of the lamp, so fatal to poem or theme that touches nature, the pages of "Field and Hedgerow" are free; they yield, rather, an odor of fruit blossoms, white violets, and hawthorne sprays, and the breath of summer fresh from English meadows. The volume opens with Jefferies's last essay, "Hours of Spring," a pathetic piece, written when the shadow of approaching death was "A thousand thousand buds and leaves and flowers and blades of grass," he tells us, "things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil can put them down, not even to number them, and how to write the thoughts they give? All these without me-how can they manage without me? Orchis flower and cowslip-I cannot remember feet-flower and bud and the beautiful clouds that them all I hear, as it were, the patter of their go over, with the sweet rush of rain, and the burst of sun glory among the leafy trees." In "The July Grass" he writes of a tuft of bird's-foot lotus: "Listen! that was the low sound of a summer wavelet striking the uncovered rock over there beneath the green sea. All things that are beautiful are found by chance, like everything that is good. Here by me is a praying-rug, just wide It is, indeed, too beautiful to enough to kneel on. kneel on, for the life in these golden flowers must not be broken down even for that purpose. They must not be defaced, not a stem bent; it is more reverent not to kneel on them, for this carpet prays itself." In "An English Deer Park" there are many beautiful passages. Looking skyward one bright day in the early spring, Jefferies sees," Everywhere brown dots, and each a breathing creature— larks ceaselessly singing, and all unable to set forth their joy. Swift as is the vibration of their throats, they cannot pour the notes fast enough to express their eager welcome. As a shower falls from the sky, so falls the song of the larks. There is no end to them: they are everywhere; over every acre away across the plain to the downs, and up on the highest hill. Every crust of English bread has been sung over at its birth in the green blade by a lark." Jefferies's writings often breathe the purest spirit of poetry, fresh, genuine, sympathetic, and lack only — if, indeed, they may be said to lack the mould of metrical art. It will be easily seen, even from the brief extracts given above, that the essays in Field and Hedgerow," though descriptive, are not mere transcripts of sense-impressions. To Jefferies the intimations of nature were manifold; mountain and meadow, tree and flower, bird and insect, they all whispered to him something of the tale of humanity. But, unhappily, his ear was over-quick to catch the sadder accents, and the dominant note in his writings is a melancholy, often a despondent one. We miss entirely the strain of high cheerfulness and abounding faith that uplifts the verse of Wordsworth. The many notices of Jefferies that have recently appeared, while doing justice to his genius for observing and describing

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nature, have laid too little stress upon his power of depicting a certain phase of human life. Few writers have excelled his accurate and sympathetic portraits of the dwellers in English farm and village.

IN Mombert's "History of Charles the Great" (Appleton), the author has furnished, not for scholars, but, in his own words, for "the public generally, an important "contribution to the literature of one of the most important and interesting periods in history." It is "for the most part drawn up from contemporary authorities, such as annals, chronicles, biographies, letters, laws, diplomas, poems, epitaphs. He says truly that "Charles the Great is incomparably the grandest name of the Middle Ages. He might have added that, if we measure by the after results of what men do, no other man has been greater. So large a character in the history of the world deserves larger space in its literature; and we are glad to welcome Dr. Mombert's five hundred octavo pages on a single reign. They are not too many for its weighty events. English readers have hitherto had no adequate presentation of this great reign, such as Martin has given to Frenchmen. The present work is encyclopædic, and covers every recorded feature of Charles's career as statesman, soldier, and man. His campaigns from the Vistula to the Garigliano or the Ebro are traced in detail; his political relations with the congeries of nationalities that owned his sway are also clearly set before us; a valuable chapter on the school of the palace and its director Alcuin brings out forcibly one of the noblest features of Charles's statesmanship; the imperial accession is handled in a thoughtful narrative which once or twice carries us beneath the surface of affairs with a shrewd reproduction of motives; finally, the Diets and the resulting capitularies receive much attention, and the latter are not only summarized but are set before us in judicious selections. A chap

ter on Administration shows us the missi dominici on their rounds, introduces us to the royal villas, the workings of the land system, and the sources of royal revenue. What we miss from the book

is not a full material but a better method. One cannot see the town for the houses. Details are allowed to crowd out deductions from them; the spirit of the age, of the man, of the institutions, does not sufficiently appear. We look in vain for some of the philosophic interpretation of details which enlivens and gives so great value to Martin's chapters on this period. What is needed by the reader, burdened with so many details, and a narrative which rapidly moves over the face of half Europe, is generalization that shall unify the multitudinous facts, and gather them about principles of action. The bewilderment is made worse by the unfortunate typographical setting, which seems determined at times to make a paragraph of almost every sentence, and gives a sketchy and disconnected effect to the whole book. Still, with these

defects, the book is valuable, if only as a collection of hitherto widely scattered information.

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UNDER the seductive title of "Authors at Home," Cassell & Co. have collected a series of papers, recently published in "The Critic," descriptive, for the most part, of the domestic surroundings and personal characteristics of prominent American writers. "How inexpressibly comfortable," exclaimed Mr. Carlyle, "to know our fellow-creature!" The American public, upon whom the spirit of Paul Pry seems to have descended, will not fail to appreciate the force of this observation-which is doubly true when the "fellow-creature" happens to be one elevated by talents or good-fortune above the multitude. Through the aid of this little volume, the curious reader may have the "inexpressible comfort" of knowing that Mr. T. B. Aldrich comes in occasionally from Lynn clad in "heavy, serviceable, reefing jacket," and that "the ends of his moustache, pointed somewhat in the French manner, seem to accentuate with a certain fitness and chic the quips and cranks which so often issue from beneath it”; that Dr. Holmes has many more than the average allowance of ancestors, and that, as a descendant of Dudley, Bradstreet, the Olivers, Quincys, and Jacksons, his hut of stone' fronts on one of Boston's most aristocratic streets, though the dear river behind it flows almost close to its little garden gate"; that in Mr. Stedman's home "there is a pervading harmony of tone and tints, the rich draperies, the soft-toned carpets, the dusk of the tempered daylight, are skilfully used as an effective background to bring into relief the pictures, the works of art, and the rare bits of bric-a-brac"; that Mr. Warner's "head is capacious, his forehead high and clear, and the kindly eyes behind his eye-glasses are noticeably wide open,"-etc., etc. While admitting this volume to be a bright and readable skimming of impressions, we are inclined to question the claim, made in a prefatory note, that in its pages one gets a "closer and more intimate view of the authors sketched than their writings could possibly afford"—a rather sweeping statement, with which the gentlemen concerning whom it is made will scarcely concur. "Authors at Home" is acceptably printed and bound, and the papers it contains, though light and sketchy, are well-written and entertaining, and by no means to be confounded with the impertinent tittle-tattle of the daily newspapers.

AN attractive little volume entitled "Lost Leaders" (Longmans) reproduces a series of editorials written by Mr. Andrew Lang for the London "Daily News." While the articles doubtless appeared to better advantage in their original formthey seem rather brief and sketchy between bookcovers they contain enough good things to warrant their reprinting. The table of contents offers an agreeable diversity of subjects. Salmon Fishing.” Sieur de Montaigne," Thackeray's Drawings," "American Humor," etc., and the themes are

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