NOVELS.
A CASTLE IN SPAIN.* Wu are glad to recognise in A Castle in Spain the partial emancipation of its author from the tyranny of a mannerism -which threatened to confine his readers to a literary coterie. We are far from wishing to deprecate the patient quest of the sovereign word, or to condemn the employment, within limits, of a decorative style. But it is possible to carry disdain for saying a plain thing in a plain way too far, and Mr. Capes in some of his recent work showed a distinct tendency to transgress the border-line which divides ornament from ex- travagance and epigram from enigma. The choice of his themes undoubtedly lent him some excuse for this attitude, since neither in plot, incident, nor characterisation has he any traffic with the commonplace. A writer who can transport his readers from the realms of actuality is always welcome, but there seemed to be some danger lest this valuable gift should be neutralised by an over-studied 'eccentricity, and even violence, of expression. That danger, if we may judge by the volume before us, is no longer acute ; the -manner no longer dominates the matter, but is in harmony with it. Our attention is no longer distracted by Mr. Capes's feats of word-jugglery from the course of the narrative. In a word, the story is not only far easier, but much more enjoyable, to read by reason of the greater simplicity of the style. When occasion requires, Mr. Capes can "screw his divine theorbo six notes higher," but the tension is not so continuous, and his pyrotechnics are all the more effective from the intervals that separate the displays.
Eschewing " actuality," and always attracted by the more picturesque and dramatic possibilities of a bygone age,, Mr. Capes has chosen for the time of his story the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries. The
narrator and hero spends the first few years of his life in ;France in the neighbourhood of ArIes, the foster-child of good -country folk, dimly conscious of the myatery of his noble parentage. Thence-be is summoned -to England by a French ; lady, the widow of English Baronet-and adopted by her- tol A Casti:4i Spain, -By Bahasa Capea:- Lozniclon Smith; Elder. gout Co, 1 be the companion of her- acknowledged son. 'From England after a while Lady Lois, a passionate intrigante who has devoted her fortune and energies to the Bourbon cause,-passes to the Continent to east in her lot with the emigrgs. Thus the scene shifts from Arles to the South Coast of England, and thence to Berlin and the Low Countries ; but wherever we go the atmosphere is charged with excitement and suspense and sus. pinion, and the stage is crowded with strange and sinister figures, adventurers and schemers and spies, poisoners and assassins. And over all hang the mystery and romance of Robin's birth, complicated by such minor mysteries as the understanding between his beautiful and distinguished mother and her vulgar intendant, M. Raton Nagle. Historic personages and royalties flit across the scene, and when the scene finally shifts to Spain the story culminates in a set of incidents by turns melodramatic and macabre, but always heightened by the manner of their telling, which can hardly fail to provide the normally constituted reader with a new thrill In the free,.picturesque, and fantastic handling of history Mr. Capes shows himself an apt disciple of the great Dumas,— indeed, of all the numerous English writers who have of late years essayed to wear the giant's robe, we are inclined to think that he is most imbued with the essential spirit of the original. The character of -the arch-traitor, M. de. Faux, " debonair, joyous and wicked," is conceived and developed with unflagging vigour and genuine gusto, though we are glad to find that Mr. Capes is sufficiently old-fashioned to award the villain his deserts, and release hero and heroine from the network of peril in which they seem inextricably involved. Mr. Capes's resourceftil inventiveness cannot be adequately illustrated within the compass of a short review. But by way of illustrating the peculiar qualities and defects of his style, his powers of description, and his bizarre imagination, we may give the passage - Which- opens the sixth chapter of this exciting romance " I was thirteen when Mrs. Van Roost and her daughter Esther took up their residence in Hythe, a waterside village some three miles by road froin our gates. Mrs. Van Roost was a clergyman's widow in depressed circumstances, a distant connection of the late Sir Janies, and. I think she came to settle near us—a more intimate patron having Lately-disappointed her in his decease—with the design to play upon Lady Loss the whole part, invulnerable in its abjectness, of a poor relation. In herself she was insignificance embodied, though a. little belied by an expression as if her teeth were always on edge from sour grapes. Her apparent claim to distinction of any sort was in mothering Esther; yet her life—of genteel poverty in many lands—had not been void of lustre. Her husband, a sporting missionary, had been devoured by South Sea cannibals, and a very remarkable relic of him survived in a thigh-bone, beautifully carved into a back-scratcher, which had been recovered by a punitive expedition, and presented years after to the widow. She has shown me this pathetic implement with gloating tears in her eyes. I think she regarded it as her passe- partout , her key to social consideration. Like Samson, she triumphed over the Philistines with her bone. She had generally a taste for bones, indeed, and kept her baby-girl's first teeth, the whole twenty of them, set into a dainty barbaric bangle. The memory of that bracelet, odd as it may seem, is always a little pathetic to me. Mother and daughter were announced for the first time one wintry afternoon when I was sitting alone with my mistress. I looked up, to see a little anxious, yellow physiognomy with sharp eyes conning us propitiatory from the threshold,. A great black-velvet bonnet, streaming drapery to the waist, held this apparition, and the most attenuated form continued it to the floor. But over its shoulder, as the moon looks round a crag, showed a ghost of a different complexion—something as- much out of the common, but infinitely contrasted—a vision of the loveliest serene face crowned with a coquettish hat then much in vogue, and called, I think, a paysanne. Seeing this vision, my heart fluttered out to it; like the dove from the ark to a new world never, as it thought, to return."
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