Maid Ellice. By Theo. Gift. (Samuel Tinsley.)—Family pride and the
honours of an ancient lineage are among the most freely used of human weaknesses as the bases of difficulties and distresses among fictitious heroes and heroines. In real life, we have little belief in their active intervention as motives in human affairs ; and in fiction they are uninteresting, because they presuppose a certain foolishness in the persons who are swayed by them. In the opening pages of Maid Ellice we find pride of lineage assigned as his chief attribute to a certain Squire Herne, in so absurd and exaggerated a form that it is impossible to believe that the author can have had a notion that she was drawing from anything like life. Mr. Horne claims to be a lineal descendant, "if not of Hengist and Hosea "—which does indeed seem unlikely—of "the first conquerors after the Romans of this sadly often conquered little island ;" he uses Saxon phrases and terms of speech, wears breeches and leather leggings, and is as un- pleasant an old gentleman as we have recently met with in a novel. Squire Herne has a meek wife, an uncomfortable daughter, and a son Robin, whom he sends to Oxford, "because Alfred the Great was supposed to have founded that 'University, and it was therefore meet that a Herne should take his degree there." To this family party is added " Maid " or Magdalen Ellice, a young lady from Monte Video, who wears a man- tilla, says "Gracias muchissimas" to her English cousins, instead of "Thank you," though she speaks English as well as they do, and has a "small, white, weary face." Then there is a Mr. Gerrant, who is artistic and cynical, and with him Margaret Herne, who has never for- given her Spanish-American cousin for kissing her on their first meeting, goes out to walk ; they are caught in a thunderstorm, and probably in consequence of the weather, Miss Herne finds herself in an extraordinary state of fooling respecting this young man, who, "till three days ago, never crossed her path," but to whom she has already given a sitting for her portrait :—
"When he looked at her, the blood rushed into her face, and a dazzle swam before her eyes. When he had loosened her hair, she trembled all over, as though under the influence of an electric shock. The touch of his hand on hers made her pulse leap like a startled fawn. The sound of his voice was like a new, strange music in her ears, com- pelling her to heed, and almost taking from her the power of reply, that she might listen to it the longer. The daring gaze of his bold, bright -eyes, the insolent freedom of his smile, had a beauty in them passing that of God's own sunlight to her."
The boldness of the author's imagery is more remarkable than its cor- rectness; a "dazzle "that swims is something with which we are wholly unacquainted. That, however, is almost comprehensible, in comparison with the description of Margaret Herne's character, which is of an incongruity that completely throws Macbeth's statement of all that one cannot be at once and the same time into the shade, and leaves on the mind of the reader an impression that the young lady's relatives were much to be pitied, for the fact that she did not really live in Central Africa, instead of Hernecroft, an abode which she resentfully compared to the former region. We are sorry to find these excessively unpleasant young women cropping up again in novels ; the pretty fools who re- placed them for some time were greatly preferable. Maid Ellice marries Robin Herne, though she is not a Saxon ; and Margaret Herne ends much better than her utter self-worship deserves. Of course, that is not the author's view, but it is the common-sense of the matter.
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