A TALE BY MISS YONGE.*
THIS is an excellent piece of work, as good in its way as any- thing that Miss Yonge has done ; though we cannot but say that the style now and then shows signs of haste. (In " the cliffs that open into the fine green pastures where feed the herds of cows whose milk made the famous Cheddar cheese," the three relatives are certainly awkward.) The author has got what authors, for various reasons, are not always allowed to have,—a canvas well proportioned to the picture that she wishes to paint. She tells " a tale of Cheddar a hundred years ago," a time when Cheddar was as barbarous a spot as could have been found in England, save, perhaps, in the neigh- bouring county of Devon. Some of its inhabitants retained the custom—inherited, it might be said, from pre-historic ancestors—of dwelling in caves (Miss Yonge tells us that the last cave-dweller lived down till little more than fifty years ago) ; and their ways of life and thought were not unsuited to their abodes. Civilising influences hardly existed. There was the Church, indeed ; but it was before the days of what may be called the home-missionary spirit, and the parson was content to leave these wild creatures, whom he would probably have been much surprised to hear called his parishioners, to themselves. Of course there was no school.
That was an institution which was still wanting in many much more civilised parishes of England. Almost the only things that were beyond the range of common material wants were a belief in charms, and, as Miss Yonge reminds us, a dim notion of a deliverer in the person of " King Monmouth"
—perhaps the very sorriest Messiah that ever was—who was to return again to the country which he had tried to save from Popish tyranny. In this land of darkness, those excellent women, Hannah More and her sisters, found one of their fields of benevolent action. Most people nowadays think of Hannah More, if they think of her at all, as an Evan- gelical blue-stocking ; while her fame, such as it is, quite obscures the modest names of her sisters. Her style, it must be allowed, is a little pedantic, and her piety was of a type which now seems old-fashioned. But though she lived before the "Catholic Revival" of which some people talk as if it were a second Christian era, she and her sister did a very good work in their generation. It is one side of this good work that Miss Yonge has portrayed in the volume before us. Her own sympathies are with a form of worship and a religious thought which the sisters More and their great friend William Wilberforce would scarcely have approved, but she gives an ample recognition to the courage and charity with which they taught these poor half-heathen Cheddarites to turn their thoughts to better things. Nor does she forget to render a due meed of praise to the good woman whom the sisters put over the school which they established in Cheddar, and who died at her post.
The story is told with all Miss Yonge's skill. Though coin• parisons are odious, we may venture to say that her literary touch, the skill with which she makes her characters live, so to speak, upon the canvas, are conspicuously noticeable among the crowd of books of a similar kind which it is our duty to read and estimate at this time. The story chiefly deals with the fortunes of two girls : one belonging to the wild Cheddar race, who develops under the kindly influences that are brought to bear upon her into a sensible, devoted, and courageous woman ; the other a weak and vain creature, but not without a saving groundwork of principle. The hero, Robin Lake, is another of the protgggs of the Mores, and is an admirable type of English manhood. We will not anticipate our readers' interest in this excellent story.
• Th• Cunning Woman's Grandson. By Charlotte N. Yonge. London National Society.
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