THE DOCTOR'S FAMILY.* T

E marked and desarvel success of " &item Chapel" has en- couraged its author to republish from the same series a story of a different and somewhat inferior kind. The Doctor's Family is not of the class, or even of the grade of novels to which " Salem Chapel" belonged. There is no evidence in it of the very singu-

lar power shown in that book of sympathizing with feelings and beliefs and moods which yet the author had never felt, or enter-

tained, or passed through, and which, therefore, she could anatomize with piquant mercilessness. There is no Mr. Vincent to be dissected with a mixture of admiration and pity ; no Mrs. Vincent to describe, with her mother's agony suppressed by a mother's fear lest outbreak of hers sh Add injure the prospects of her son. Nor is there much of that Dutch painting of external

facts which lent so singular a charm to that tale, no interior like that of the butter-shop, with pick-armed Phoebe preparing always in a flutter of consciousness for the wooing she does not receive. Above all, there is no Mr. Tozer, no personage who lives and moves, enabling us to understand the ways and the strength and the weakness of a class known, but not

before analyzed. The personages of the Doctor's Family are, most of them, very shadowy people, drawn as if the

limner were too hurried to care about features,and content if only the intention could be recognized without a label beneath. The doctor himself has no individuality at all. The reader feels that he belongs to the class never yet fairly described, who, with the thoughts of the educated have the instincts of the vulgar, who, for example, though really able and clear-headed, can never understand women, or keep down a certain impetuosity very fatal in managing men ; but he cannot extricate him individually from the multitude to whom he belongs. His brother is equally indistinct—a heavy, flaccid, drinking man, of no conceivable use on earth except to call out the passive virtues of those to whom he is unfortunately tied, but not more or less heavy, or flaccid, or drunken, or useless, than the hundreds Qf such men one stumbles over in life. His wife, Susan, is distinct enough, but

only as a querulous fool, the very essence of whose character is that, except querulousness and folly, and a certain lazy prettiness rather assumed than described, she has no character at all. Chathrain the Bushman and dens ex nzschind is a lay figure, and the minor persons mere indications, real only as the footmen who clear the boards are real characters on the stage. The framework is but poor, badly carved and worse gilded, and rapped together

without much of the needful cementing glue.

But then it surrounds a wonderful portrait. We are not sure that, had the authoress expended on Nettie the patient care lavished on Tozer and Vincent, whether those readers—and they are many— who admire beauty more than reality, who prefer Dow to Teniers, and want pictures first of all to suggest pleasantness, would not have pronounced hers the finer portrait of the two. Even as it is, though the work is hurriedly done, and many a line and touch are still visibly wanting, and every feature bears marks of inartistic haste and incompleteness, Nettie is a creation. We know of no character in fiction whom she in the least resembles, though oddly enough she always suggests to ourselves a character with whom she has nothing apparently in common—Sir Walter Scott's Fenella. A little lithe Australian fairy, she has seen her silly sister ruined by her lout of a husband, and the children growing up savages, and calmly takes them all on her own shoulders, brings them to England, and plays in Carlingford earthly providence—keeping the husband in order, ruling the children, doing all that the fretful wife is too helpless to attempt, too silly to thank her for accomplishing. Women have done all that often enough in fiction as well as reality, but it has been from love, or pity, or religious emotion, or some feeling which rises in its intensity to the height of passion. But the speciality of Nettie is that she does all this, not from any of these motives, but from the impulse of, what seems to her, common sense, and is common sense strengthened and made active, cool, and sensi- ble, by an idea of duty. A worthy but weak spinster friend, who gives the reader the comic effect of being real, not because he has seen her, but because he remembers her in some half-forgot- ten story of Miss Austen's, remonstrates with her on ner life, and her answer is the key to her character.

"If one's friends are not very sensible, is that a reason why one should go and leave them? Is it right to make one's escape directly whenever one feels one is wanted, or what do you mean, Miss Wodehouse ? ' said the vehement girl. That is what it carnet' to, you know. Do you imagine 1 bad any choice about coming over to England, when Susan was breaking her heart about her husband ? Could one let one's sister • Chronicles of Carlutiford. Zit Doctors Family. By the Author of " Salem Chapel." Blackwood and Sons. die, do you suppose ? And now that they are all tozether, what choice have I ? They can't do much for esch other ; there is actually nobody but me to take care of them all. You may say it is not natural, or it is not right, or anything you please, but what else can one do ? That is the practical question,' sail Nettie, triumphantly. If you will answer that, then I shall know what to say to you." Miss Wodehouse gazed at her with a certain mild exasperation, shook her head, wrung her hands, but could find nothing to answer. ' I thought so,' said Nettie, with a little outburst cf jubilee; 'that is how it always happens to abstract people. Pat the practical question before them, and they have not a word to say to you. Freddy, cut the grass with the scissors—don't emit my trimmings; they are for your own frock, you little savage. If were to say it was my duty, and all that sort of stuff, you would under- stand me, Miss Wodehouse; but one only says it is one's duty when one has something disagreeable to do, and I am not doing anything dis- agreeable,' added the little heroine."

She almost scorns her foolish sister, and slaves for her, wholly scorns her brother-in-law, yet accepts him as one of the incidents of a lot at,which she has no thought of repining. "Nettie, valorous and simple, made up her mind to it. He was Fred— that was all that could be said on the subject ; and being Fred, belonged to her, and bad to be cared fur like the rest." The doctor proposes to her and site loves him, but she neither accepts nor rejects him, but simply pleads the " impossi- bility" of deserting her post, or throwing her burden on to him. When the brother dies, drowned in a drunken fit, her work is even clearer, for her relatives are more helpless, and her sister even frets her into a consent to return to Australia. She- can rule the weak, selfish widow, but incessant dropping wears- the stone, and she has begun to pack when Susan announces that she has agreed to marry an Australian friend. All difficulties- are removed, and Nettie—the touch is the finest in the book—site down an " indignant Titania," not exulting in her emancipation,.

but resenting the domestic treachery which amidst all her sacri- fices had kept from her the most important arrangenrmt of all.

We have described a female prig ?—so we perceive, but that is- our incompetence, not that of the author. The merit of her creation, in an artistic sense, is that she has placed her heroine in such a position, yet made her simply a girl, a natural, warm- hearted, impulsive being, always alive with humour and incisive good sense, addicted to clever rapid chatter, and as free from the self-consciousness of virtue as she is from priggishness. (By the way, why do we apply that word to men only?) The domestic- providence who goes to church in the early morning, and teaches her sisters, and keeps the house, and " guides " her father, and lectures her brothers, and quickens the flagging zeal of the curate,

and is generally the most admirable and excruciating of bores, is familiar enough to us all. Else Miss Yonge and Miss Sewell have lived and written in vain. But Nettie is none of these, only one of those girls whom most men have met once in life, who add a manlike efficiency and decision to their feminine acuteness of perception and capacity for enduring love, and who,. when once understood, make those to whom that fortunate com- prehension is given listen to arguments about woman's want

of capacity with a smile which has in it some tolerant scorn. Who has not seen such a being, girl or woman, with a head as. clear as her heart is soft, whose instincts are as safe guides as other people's experience, whose perception never errs as to character, or as to the road which must willingly or unwillingly at last be pursued, who cannot speak vaguely or diffusely if she would, and who is called by weak men satirical because she cannot help being pointed. It is impossible to read the Doctor's Family with the eager attention enforced by Salem Chapel," but very few readers will lay it down without feeling themselves the happier and the stronger for their intimate personal acquaintance

with Nettie Underwood.