Miss Brown. By Vernon Lee. (Blackwood.)—We cannot review this book
at the length its power would justify, the subject and -treatment being too repulsive. We have no doubt that the intention of the book is pure, and even noble, to paint an Anglo-Italian girl who, from the circumstances of her life, has heard everything and understood everything, but remains chaste alike in mind and body, and passes along through the vilenesses of the London fleshly school, a Una among the beasts. It takes a great poet, however, to describe minutely satyrs and she-apes without exciting disgust ; and `Vernon Lee is not a poet, but only a strong writer overloaded with knowledge, who exaggerates the area of the sexual question in life, and who, in long study of early Italian literature and the history of the Renaissance, has lost touch with English feeling, and does not always know what it is good to say or leave unsaid. The portrait of Sacha, the Russian adventuress, is painted from a depth of 'bate and scorn ; but Zola would have shrunk from some touches, and the total result is a figure not so much bad cr vicious as ,putrescent. Sacha taints the air, till Anne Brown cannot clear it. We must add that, noble as Anne's figure is, her final act is revolting, and shows an utter perversity in the author's conception of nobility. It is intended, we suppose, to indicate the last extremity of self- abnegation ; bat a Una who prostitutes herself is a monstrosity. We are carefully told not only that Anne had a deep moral hate of her despicable benefactor—a weak, drunken victim to Sacha—but that -she had a physical loathing for him, that she is of an "active purity," -that she felt such a marriage to be neither more nor less than prosti- tution, that she had no hope even of redeeming him, but only of keeping -him from growing worse, yet, without the faintest necessity, loving all the while an honest man who wants her, Anne proposes to the profligate, and lets him believe that she takes him, not out of self- sacrifice at the shrine of gratitude, bat from a hidden love for him- self. And she is a martyr-saint This is intolerable.
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