Before I could make any reply, Madeline had sprung from the chair in the corner, and was seated on the couch by her father. I was about to entreat the young lady to remain where she had been; but the politeness of the two insisted on my accepting of their polite attentions. The father spoke English, but, like most foreigners, indifferently. Madeline, however, addressed me in a manner that showed her greater proficiency in our language; and when her father could not clearly express himself, she took upon her the gentle office of being his interpreter. I had not forgot my French, and as the quartette could express themselves in that tongue, we adopted it as the most agreeable to the party.

"Have you been an invalid some time?" inquired Monsieur de Berryer, as he looked me in the face, and spoke in a tone of tenderness and paternal feeling.

"During several months," replied I, "my health has been indifferent, and, at the request of my physicians, I now return, in the hopes of improvement, to my native land."

"You are right, monsieur, you are right. Health is beyond every other blessing. We, too, are going to England," concluded De Berryer, in a half-suppressed sigh.

"Were you ever in England, monsieur ?" asked I.

"Never."

"The captain calculates our voyage at seven or eight days from Malaga to the Thames, if only the winds are favourable," continued I. "But we are tacking now, monsieur," replied De Berryer, " and the wind blows well-nigh full ahead—but here comes our commander. Cap

tain, pray how long do you suppose we shall be on our voyage? From what I know of seafaring matters, our progress is unusually slow."

"God only knows how long we shall be. This morning there was not wind enough to fill a petticoat; and now, when it has freshened a little, it is full against us," returned the hardy son of Neptune, in rough and ronchous voice, which was quite in keeping with bluff, weatherbeaten features, broad shoulders, and herculean frame of that choice specimen of the British tar.

"Well, well, never mind, only the steward's room be well stored," observed De Berryer; "if we are blown out to sea we will make the best of it. I have been under more unfavourable circumstances in my time."

The captain assured us, that if blown out to sea, we should not have to undergo the misery of short commons; at the same time he moved off to the opposite side of the cabin, and opening a locker, as if unperceived by, or perhaps regardless of those around, poured out, and then threw down his throat, a glassful of neat rum, which matter-of-course action might have passed unnoticed, had it not been for the hearty smack which he gave as if in the honest appreciation of the prime old Jamaica that he had received as a present from a West India trader. The ladies were evidently amused at his coarse bluntness; and when they gazed upon his brawny proportions, those huge whiskers, that sea-burnt face, the sou'-wester, and pilot coat, they did indeed contemplate with amazement such a burly, untutored son of humanity.

"Monsieur Sommerton, do you play at chess?" asked De Berryer; "if you do, I should be delighted to have a battle with you."

"It will give me great pleasure, monsieur," replied I; "and many

8

long and obstinate game I have contended at Gibraltar with my brother officers, to wile away the often irksome monotony of a garrison life. But perhaps the ladies would like to play?" continued I, then throwing an admiring glance at the bewitching dark eyes by my side.

66

"No-no, you and monsieur play, Captain Sommerton," answered they, both simultaneously; "and we, if you please, will be spectators." Madeline, my dearest, go into my berth, and you will find the chessmen immediately on opening the large trunk," said the father, at the same time placing in his beautiful daughter's hand the key.

Madeline arose, drawing her mantilla more closely around her, proceeded to De Berryer's dormitory, and soon returned with the white and red armies for the contest. Ere long, De Berryer and I were absorbed in the game; and although I was the allowed champion in our garrison, I could perceive from a few moves that my opponent was more than a match for me. Both from the first seemed determined on victory, and

each made his move with more than common care and calculation. Now a move; then, after a long and reflective pause, another; neither spoke ; the ladies anxiously watched the contest, and more than two hours had passed over before Madeline clapped her hands exultingly: "Checkmate, monsieur, the gentleman has beat you!" She then burst into a good-natured laugh, and said, "Monsieur, it is a long time since you had so tiresome a rival as Captain Sommerton.'

"You must indeed have had considerable practice, Captain Sommerton," observed Madame Vauville, "as Monsieur De Berryer is deemed a very superior player. I trust this will be the prelude to many a coming game.

"I shall have much pleasure-very much pleasure in playing to-morrow; nor should I have minded another trial of our strength to-night; but my doctors insisted on the desirableness of my retiring at an early hour."

"To-morrow-to-morrow, captain," said De Berryer; "you are right in attending to the injunctions of your medical advisers. I am glad to find in you so powerful an enemy. The renewal of these conflicts will to us both make the otherwise dull hours at sea pass pleasantly. But here comes the supper. Jules (to the man-servant), set the ladies' chairs on the opposite side, and go fetch me dry toast and tea-'twill suit me better to take a light repast than to eat more substantial viands."

As to myself, I could take nothing; and after having drank a couple of glasses of Sauterne, I bade my newly-formed friends good night. When partly undressed, I threw my back against the partition of my snug dormitory, thrust my hands into the pockets of my pantaloons, and was instanter lost in reverie. On the previous evening I was overjoyed at the thoughts of returning to my native land, and conceived the voyage alone lay between me and that pleasure; now- -aye-so soon I thought otherwise, I cared not whither the winds blew us-where the fates tossed us-would not have minded being driven to the antipodes-only-only Madeline was there! Home, country, friends, and pleasures, were "quite forgotten in that absent trance!" Then, breaking silence, I exclaimed, "who can she be, and what is De Berryer? I would give my commission to know. I would have her yes!-yes! if she had not a ducat for her dowry."

To have been deeply and devotedly, however inconsistently, in love with an entire bevy of fair ladies, one after the other, in rapid succession, is, we would fain hope, more pardonable where they are the creatures of fiction than in real life. Otherwise we are verily and exuberantly guilty in this matter; and, in common with us, Mrs. Marsh, the author of this 'manifold calamity, has much to answer for. If we have been susceptible so often, and so often faithless-now over head and ears in love with an innocent brunette, now engaged past recal to a pensive blonde-if we have been as comprehensive and gradational in our affections as the vacillating poet who sings, unblushingly enough, how he was enamoured of an infinite series of Marys and Annes, Isabellas and Marthas—

Gentle Henrietta then,

And a third Mary next began,

Then Joan, and Jane, and Audria,
And then a pretty Thomasine,

And then another Catherine,

And then a long " et cetera," *.

if we have been absorbed in attachment to an Angela, and then sworn eternal fealty to a Flavia, and next week vowed everything that pretty is to a little Joan Grant, and anon plighted our troth to a Clarice de Vere, and haud longo intervallo done the same to a bewitching Clarinda, and then been enthralled by the power of that awful demoiselle, Grace Vaux, and in a trice raving about Lila, and charmed to a "power" which has no mathematical symbol by Emilia Wyndham-if by these and a score besides of equivalent syrens, we have been seduced from constancy and final perseverance, and have in intent been polygamists of inveterate habit and illimitable range-then we turn round, ungratefully, but not causelessly, upon the author of all our mishaps, and accuse her of being accomplice before the fact, and piteously upbraid her with the reproach, Why did you make them all so winning, if it was a sin in us to be won? Why did you create them with such powers, if the exercise must needs entail aggravated mischief? Some creators fail to charm us with their creations, charm they never so wisely. But you and yours have no such excuse. And you at least cannot join in the impeachment of inconstancy against us, for you it was who produced in rapid succession each too fascinating fair one, and who qualified each with a peerless pair of bright eyes to rain influence upon us, and adjudge the prize to herself. Our sin lies at your door, and day and night on you it cries, as with the west-end thunder of a footman's double rap.

Another point in which we have again and again felt Mrs. Marsh's

*Cowley: "The Chronicle." Abraham's only compunction seems to have been felt when there ensued a temporary cessation of these engagements: whereupon he says,

"Thousand worse passions then possess'd
The interregnum of my breast;

Bless me from such an anarchy!"

masterly and moving power, is what we may term the pathos of the retrospective. The very machinery she loves to employ for the evolution of her tales, involves something of this :-we hear "Two Old Men” recalling the deeds of the past, and the forms of the departed,

The voices of the dead, and songs of other years.

The aged address us on the events and friendships of their fervid youth, and describe the "blessed household countenances" then radiant with promise, now dim in memory-then beauteous with exuberant life, now mouldering amid the "dishonours of the grave." Apensive sadness suffuses every recollection; for it pertains so entirely to the "long ago," that, as each brightsome maiden trips before us, we seem to view her as the heart-burdened seer might do, to whom the end is visible from the beginning, and whose accursed privilege it is to scan, with frightful telescopic range and telescopic accuracy of vision, the autumn and winter, as well as the spring and summer of her life, and to peer into the decaying decline as well as the joyous blossoming of the days of the years of her pilgrimage. She comes, "borne on airs of youth,"

-Old days sing round her, old memorial days,

She crown'd with tears, they dress'd in flowers, all faded—
And the night fragrance is a harmony

All through the Old Man's soul.

-Soft, sweet regrets, like sunset

Lighting old windows with gleams day had not.

Ghosts of dead years, whispering old silent names

Through grass-grown pathways, by halls mouldering now.
Childhood-the fragrance of forgotten fields;

Manhood—the unforgotten fields whose fragrance
Pass'd like a breath.*

What, it has been asked, would be the heart of an old weather-beaten hollow stump, if the "leaves and blossoms of its youth were suddenly to spring up out of the mould around it, and to remind it how bright and blissful summer was in the years of its prime !" It is ever easy, comparatively, to wring the soul by a few touching "retrospective reviews" of this kind-for the images of yore

Which they awaken, glide from misty years
Dreamlike and solemn, and but half unfold
Their tale of glorious hopes, religious fears,
And visionary schemes of giant mould;

Whose dimmest trace the world-worn heart reveres,
And, with love's grasping weakness, strives to hold.+

But it is not so easy to sway the soul in its musings, and to sound its deep and desolate places in the manner characteristic of the "Two Old Men." There is a genuine, equable, underlying, vital force in their pathos at once impassioned, and yet of ample power to chasten and

subdue.

With such qualities alone, had the novelist none others of value, she would justly challenge the interest and attention of all that are gentle and true of heart. A pre-eminent skill in the construction of womanly

* Sydney Yendys.

+ Sir T. N. Talfourd (Sonnets).

character, and an impressive tone in reviving the emotions of the past, are as decidedly important in the qualifications of a novelist, as they are assuredly at the command of the one now before us. But these are the two particulars in which her writings most favourably attract us. In story, she is not always very happy, or original, or painstaking; in miscellaneous character, she is often flighty and inconsistent; in reflective and didactic passages, she occasionally lingers and loiters, and scatters truisms by the way; and as for humour, when it does come, it is by such petty driblets, and in such diluted dulness, that to laugh at it on the right side of the mouth would require a phiz with other facial angles, and a diaphragm of far livelier excitability, than ours. As to style, she indulges to an undue degree in the spasmodic and fragmentary, breaking up her sentences into minute fractions, and isolated interjections, and stammering solecisms, and jerking instalments, and abrupt adjournments; amid which no sober colon can find rest for the sole of his foot, nor even sprightly comma for the curl of his tail. Enough said to prove ourselves no blind neck-or-nothing devotees. Now we may go on praising again, with a comfortable conscience.

Once upon a time we used to dip into what are styled religious novels. That was generally on Sundays. But even on Sundays we are now too dyspeptic for diet so preposterously heavy, and would almost as soon wind up the Sabbath with a profane and profuse supper of pork chops. There is more religion, of a practical, persuasive, and influential sort, we now incline to hold, in the secularities of Mrs. Marsh's fictions, than in the systematised sanctities of the technically-called religious tale. A high, healthy moral tone-freshened and rarefied withal by devout spiritual reverence-imbues her writings. At times, indeed, the structure of her plot is calculated to suggest questions of casuistry, and to elicit, at the best, but an equivocal assent to her own interpretation of duty. But even then, if she errs, it is on the side which a rigid morality would countenance, and judgment rejoice against mercy, self-sacrifice triumph over selfishness, stoic principle over virtuous passion. She has done much, very much, to rescue the novel from the stigma and obloquy of mere frivolity, and to enlist among its admirers, and even its students, those minds of graver cast and stricter demands who were once limited to Hannah More and her apostolical successionists. Evidently and invariably she writes with purity of purpose and earnestness of moral aim; and those who leave her without a sense of being bettered by the intercourse, must, we submit, be rather prejudiced, or very perfect characters. She has laid to heart, and reproduced in breathing "forms and images," something of the philosophy of Wordsworth

With life and nature purifying thus

The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.*

All this, however, without the air of a severe or straitlaced moral essayist, or the production of mere heavy reading. With all her elevated and monitorial accents, there mingles an impassioned tone of chivalrous feel

"The Prelude." Book i.

Nov.-VOL. XCVI. NO. CCCLXXXIII.

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