Gwen Wynn: a Romance of the Wye. By Captain Mayne
Reid.. (Tinsley.)—We used to find Captain Reid's stories amusing ; we used to like his impossible heroes, their unheard-of adventures and hair's-breadth 'scopes, his dashing mode of dealing with unknown regions, and the Impulsive love at first sight which generally occurred in his books, and saved us and him a great deal of meandering. Ho was best in hia books for boys, in which style did not so much matter, and he might be a chartered libertine as regards construction. For the literary merit of his works there never was anything to be said; they had no literary merit; but we liked them, Therefore we are sorry to be obliged to condemn Captain Mayne Reid's latest story, Gwen Wynn. He is not at all in his element in a tale of English life, and his capacity to delineate French character is on a par with his knowledge of the French language, with extraordinary perversions of which ho interlards his dialogue. The greatest villain of the story, in which every one who is not a lay figure is a villain, is a French Jesuit, who is for sonao un- accountable reason domiciled in a village on the Wye, where he main- tains criminal relations with the wife of the villain second to himself in wickedness ; and entertains criminal intentions towards Mary Morgan, a pretty Welsh girl, with "chrome" hair—an absolutely now variety to ma —besides which he witnesses a murder, and having got the perpetrator,. Coracle Dick, into his power by keeping the secret of his guilt, incites the second villain to carry off his heiress-cousin, and shut her up in a con- vent at Boulogne. The popular Jesuit is supposed to be an astute per- son, but we don't think M. Rogier very clever, for though he substitutes the dead body of the murdered Mary Morgan for the living Gavendoline,, he "immures" the latter in a place so easy of access, that her deliverer has merely to throw a stone with a letter tied round it in at the win- dow; and when he has induced Coracle Dick, his tool and victim, the murderer of Mary Morgan, to murder Lewin Murdock, who is the second villain, and has then poisoned Coracle Dick, while attend- ing his death-bed in the character of a minister of religion, he tolls Mrs. Murdock, the widow of the second villain and his own mistress, what he has done. Now there, we think, Captain Mayne Reid fails to depict the popular Jesuit. In M. Rogior's place, we should have said nothing about these things ; but then it is a tendency of novel-readers to believe that they should be much cleverer murderers than the interest- ing out-threats they read about. And no Frenchman, not oven a Jesuit, would say " °tette chat," " a devoid nun," " porfaitment," "him Bile do formica' Morgan," " number vingt-un," "le bagage bleu arrangd," or " l'establisaement des Mains." One need not be even a Frenchman, much less a Jesuit, to know that the Haute Ville of Boulogne is not a cite, that "Rue Tintelleriee" is not sense, and that Clafd de billars is not a French phrase at all. Captain Mayne Reid is not fortunate in his Italian, either ; one wonders how, having ever road the word, he could spell 7'ofana with the ph, which does not exist in the language.
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