16 MARCH 1839, Page 17

TRIALS OF TI1E HEART

Is a collection of tales founded on actual occurrences, which have fallen under Mrs. BRAT'S observation, or been told to her by others; and possesses, as might be expected, time minuteness and peculiarity of individual life, but with much of truth and much of reality. We question, indeed, whether Mrs. Ilmty's powers do not appear to greater advantage in the present work than in any of her other novels. In a simple story of real life, the singleness of the interest and events, and the paucity of characters, are favour- able to her peculiar capabilities ; which, always clear, and some- times thlicitous in presenting a transcript of' the actual, want the breadth, the elevation, the spirit., and perhaps the art, necessary in a large fiction. At the same time, there are in Trials of the Heart,

as in most of her other productions, a good deal of over-elabora- tion and minute detail approaching to this veriest gossip, as in Part I. of "The Little Doctor." We must also note, that her ability as an artist, or a critic in art, is occasionally made too prominent. She describes some of her persons as she would criticize a picture or draw up a physiognomical report • a method which gives .mean- ing, force, perhaps distinctness, to the features, but after all does not present to the mind a poetical idea of a whole thee, and is a very singular example of a good quality injured by being misap- plied or overused.

There are five tales ; three of common English life; two of pro- vincial French, the stories and materials fia• which were picked up by Mrs. Baal- during her excursions in Brittany and La VenGe. Of those of the first class, " The Little Doctor" turns upon the incident of a beautiful and interesting but deformed girl rejecting her lover in consequence of an old resolution never to marry, and dying on learning her suitor's death in a foreign land. In the sub- ject there is not much ; but interest is imparted by the peculiarity of the characters, the delicate minuteness with which they are de- scribed, and the tender pathos with which the narrative is wrought out, notwithstanding the roundabout introduction. "Vicissitudes" is the autobiography of a gentlewoman, whom circumstances parted front her first love, and compelled to marry for worldly advantage, but misfortunes subsequently reduced to the depth of misery. It is a tale of more variety and distress than "The Little Doctor :" but much of its vmxiety is that of travel, diversified by a gale of wind and at series of parties at Gottenburg, where Gustavus the Third, the hero of the opera, was present ; and it good deal of its distress is pecuniary, though relieved by parental affection. The incidents also are rather commonplace : but there is truth in the gradual manner in which distress of sentiment fides away before the sor- rows of affection and death, and in which all past intellectual misery is forgotten, or remembered to be made light ot: under the pressure of actual necessity.

" The Prediction" is the tale of a clergyman who undesignedly, it is told, but without doubt surreptitiously, wins the affections of his patron's daughter, from his pupil, to whom she is betrothed; a result which in its consequences, though not in its causes or its conduct, exactly fulfils a prediction made to him at Oxford. by .a tbrtune-teller of much reputation in his day, and whose reading of the stars, or more probably of the characters of persons applying to him, sometimes came true. The immoral conduct of the two parties to this story is by no means of a very high order, or very natural, it' it be looked at in a general way ; but it is true as told of the ; for the parson has a weakness in his character verging upon insanity, and the heroine has a morbid weakness of constitu- tion, and nerves which often react upon the mind, and dispose their possessor to wavering conduct.

The French tales aim at a higher and more romantic character than the English : being made vehicles tbr describing at length time nature of the country, and time customs of its people, as well as in- troducing some of time more striking scenes of the Revolation.—as the war ot' La Vendee, the proscriptions at Nantes, the meeting of time National Assembly in defiance of the King. and one of its he- roes, Miniboom These timings are well connected with the main stories, which they vary and relieve ; and they are done with con-

siderable power, though with an obvious purpose in the author to uphold Toryism, as well as she may. At the same time. what is gained in variety and extent of subject is lost, we suspect. in truth and nature : the individual characters are those of romance, rather than of the times of the French Revolution.

The minuteness of pencilling, which is almost necessary in giv- ing fulness to sketches of private life, has enabled Mrs. Baal- to intermingle her narrative with many graceful reflections, or little miniatures of character. Ex. gr.

A tiAlt0B.

I can remember, when I was a child, and used oecasionally to visit at the doetor's,-seeing at his house sonic of these grand East Indians, whose manners were to me at that period a matter of great wonder and amazement. Oue of them was a gentleman, not out in years, but in constitution. Ile used to honour the little doctor with staying at his house for several days together : for he fancied that none of the medical tribe treated his case so well as he did;

and be always staid with him before his spring visit to Cheltenham. He was a tall thin man, with a face as yellow as saffron. His hands were of the same hue, and the very whites dins eyes were of a golden tincture. I remember that he used to dress like nobody else, for he wore, half the day, a great shawl night-gown, lined and trimmed and furred, that seemed as thick as a French bed-quilt Ile used to sit lounging in an easy chair, with his legs upon another, and always had a little table by his side, on which he invariably kept a pair of long silver tongs, that I thought were much too pretty for the fire- place, and yet were too large for sugar-tongs, and wcndered what they could be for, till I found that he employed them to pick up his pocket handkerchief, or his newspapers, or any stray thing that he might chance to let fall. And what with turning and unfolding his papers (for he read nothing else, and had, I believe, a dozen a day), and with fishing for his handkerchiefs, which seemed a constant resource to him—to be sure to use the silk for the snuff and the cam- bric fur his eyes, he managed to keep up a sort of ideal occupation of his time that never failed him. 'I hose silver tongs, and a black man, whom he called. his Friday (in allusion, no doubt, to Robinson Crusoe) did all the work for him that lie reqnired by way of attendance. I do not wonder he was ill, for he was the laziest man I ever saw in all my life. He would never walk. Some- times for amusement he would play at cards ; but even then he would get one of the doctor's children to deal for him, for the trouble seemed too great.

USE or HABITS OF INDUSTRY.

Let none who would seek a restoration of their peace ever voluntarily in- dulge in idleness, or in that slight and trifling employment which firms only its excuse. On the contrary, let them draw out for themselves (if neither necessity nor duty impose it) a plan of constant occupation that must be fol- lowed steadily, iagularly in its recurrence. It may be irksome at first—it may in the commencement be fruitless ; but perseverance will have its perfect work at last ; the attention will become arrested, thoughts will cease to wander, habits will become fixed, and the mind will at length find that it receives invi- gorated health, as grae.m;lly but as surely as the continued but impaTeptible breathings of a pure and invigorating atmosphere restore to the wasted hotly, after firer, that strength which has been prostrated by a destructive ardour

• during its horning course. Impassioned persons, more than all others, need this discipline ; it forms the moral government that every mind so constituted. owes to itself, and which nought but itself can carry on. Persons of high capacities, of more than ordinary powers and affections, draw round them, like the magnet, many and complicated connexions in the social circle, wherein they move as in a sphere; and they must necessarily find themselves fre- quently.crossed by contending obligations, by opposing duties or li:elings, by painful claims, by mat:y temptations. With such, disappointment, mental anguish, arc at all times a certain portion of their lot, a part of their compact with life—what they are to receive as the very consequence or result of what they p.4-ass ; and act how they may, though they may rarely deviate from what is just, 1 et with them, even to do right, in this imperfect state of things, must frequently be to suffer, to sorrow, to offend. With such, to overcome pain depends not so mach on any sudden efforts, as on the predominant and fixed habits of their lives ; for neither man nor woman, having a determined object of pursuit, that calls forth the active energies of the mind, can over sink under calamity, unless that calamity has its barb envenomed with the poison of remorse; for if there be remorse in affliction, there the spirit becomes wounded indeed; and of such a spirit well may it be said, "Who shall boar it ?"

The virulence of Mrs. BRAY against the French Revolution, is not only unphilosophical, violent, womanish, and in a critical sense unfair, but also untrue; for she implicates corruption against the Jacobins; which, though it might characterize individuals amongst them, was not the characteristic of the party. The following pas- sage is something beyond these charges.

" But though, since those days, manners had changed, morals were not much better. The same deeds were dote, bat in is new kind of way ; and the Devil turned from the harlots, and got the philosophers to do his work ; answering their incocalions bgpouring out viva them an unusual portion of leis inspiration; and leaving Voltaire among them to the extreme verge of old age, and till he could no longer spare such a subject from the regions below."

Saying nothing of the blindness of seeing only the last conse- quence of a long series of causes, or the taste of the passage we have marked in Italics, what shall we think of its charity, or its presumption ? If Mrs. BRAY has any just comprehension of the religion in which she professes to believe, and which she attempts to advocate in fiction, she must know that a high authority has told us, that all gifts, how excellent soever—even the power of prophe- sying—or " fiiith to move mountains"—or "goods given to feed the poor"—or "the body to be burned"—are "nothing without charity." But if kindness of heart, or decorum, could not restrain her flippant presumption, she might have been stopped by the awful, denunciation "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Truly, one would suppose the Reverend Mr. BRAY'S flock to be indif- ferently taught, when the head of his household can not only think, and write, but give to the world, a sort of blasphemy, which, though common amongst eontrovertists of another time, has been banished by the refinement if not the virtue of the present age.