12 NOVEMBER 1864, Page 18

ABBOT'S CLEVE.* Abbot's Cleve is not a character-novel, nor precisely

a sensation- novel, but it is a very good and entertaining circumstance-novel,- one of that kind in which the interest consists in tracking a chain of evidence link by link. We are not sure that this sort of novel is not on the whole the most idle reading or rather the most resting reading -to 'a fagged mind,—more strictly amusing reading in the old sense of diverting your mindfrom the Muses, more like a game of cards in just interesting you enough at a single point to leave all the rest of your faculties quiet without any slrt of excuse for rest- 'beefless, and yet requiring no effort of attention because rousing it involuntarily, than any other species of novel. You can see at a glance where you get a new link of evidence, and the intervening padding of preparatory conversation or subsequent emotion you pass along with a positive sense of repose. It is like floating down a river in a boat. At every new reach there is a sense of pleasurable curiosity, and in the meantime there is a pleasant and peaceful consciousness of knowing all about it without attending to it, and yet moving ou too towards something fresh.

.Abbot's Cleve is a very goad specimen of this kind of novel, having a very ingenious plot cleverly worked out. The charac- ters are nothing whatever but the Court cards of the game, their sole interest being in the degree in which they contribute to the working out of the incidents. The key of the plot is a poisoning case, iu which all the apparent motive for the murder, all the prima' facie suspicion, falls upon an innocent girl,—on whom all the property belonging to the poisoned woman is entailed,—but who is not, however, oven accused of it at the inquest, from the absence of any known evidence, however faint, against her. There is, however, very strong circumstantial evidence against her, known only to one person, an avaricious old servant, who had seen her standing with a medicine bottle in her hand in the room of her rich cousin at dawn of the day on which the final and fatal dose of poison was taken. This evidence he offers to sup- press at the inquest for adequate compensation, having himself no doubt at all of the girl's guilt, though she is really innocent, and she is weak enough in the terror of her soul at the strength of the case against her, and the thought of being deemed guilty of such an act by her lover, to accept his offer. Of course she falls into his power, and after her marriage her husband himself learns this person's power over her, finally shares the belief in her guilt, abandons without of course denouncing her, and the problem is how the knot is to be untied and the guilt :brought home to the true murderer without apparently the smallest evidence of any sort except the incriminated girl's {which is worth less than nothing) against him, and with all the apparent motive on the other side, for while the real murderer -has been beggared by the death of his wife the suspected one has been made the mistress of a rich estate. At this point

• • Abbe. Cleve; or, Can it be Proved? A Novel in Three 'Volumes. London: occurs perhaps the only flaw in the welding of the circumstantial chain. To produce its perfect effect the evidence should be pieced slowly out, circumstance and suggestion, suggestion and verification, the idea finding the fact, the fact discovering a new idea, as the social life of the Romans is reconstructed by inference from the vestiges disinterred in Pompeii or Herculaneum, or the habits of an extinct species of animal are recovered from the hints of a bone or two and the situation in which they are found. But to satisfy the imagination one would like to see every step that is taken to unravel the facts suggested to the acuteness of the investigating avenger by the state of the case as it lies before him, and no help derived from sheer accident. It was quite open to the author of the present novel to manage this. The criminal analyst in this case is a Mr. Richard Austin, who is engaged to the sister of the accused girl's husband, and who, .after he has gained a full conviction of her innocence and the injustice done to her, is yet so completely checkmated by the difficulty of the case that only the accidental encounter with a trace of another crime com- mitted by the real murderer suggests to him the true clue to fol- low in order to obtain some power over him. This, however, was discreditable to his otherwise very ingenious analysis. Knowing certainly who was the murderer, his first step was clearly to dis- cover, if he could, the motive for the murder of the details of which he was already in possession. By a little cross-examina- tion of the innocent girl who was held guilty of the crime he could easily have come upon the traces of an adequate motive, —for the history of the few days previous would have soon sug- gested it to an acute mind possessed of full certainty as to the person of the murderer. Once suspecting the motive—jealousy and revenge—he would have been naturally led to inquire whe- ther the other person involved had not suffered at the hands of the murderer, and so would have come himself upon the clue which is put into his' hands by sheer accident in the story as it now stands. This is, as far as we are aware, .the only fault in the closely-linked chain of circumstantial discovery. But it does rather spoil the effect of the story to have this one flaw—an accidental starting-point—in the coherency of the rea- soning by which the analyst effects his discovery. The interest of the book is almost that of a mathematical problem, and this is diminished by any of the data being accidental when a very slight backward prolongation of the chain of inference would have deduced the whole from the original spring of the crime—its motive. Notwithstanding this little defect the circumstantial chain is forged with admirable closeness of texture, and we do not think the novel will be laid down by any one who can avoid it from one end to the other of its length.