30 OCTOBER 1886, Page 17

TWO SCOTCH NOVELS.* ALL the scenes in A Northern Lily

are not Scotch ; nor are all the characters. But the heroine is, poor thing. Above all things, the best and most notable figure in the story, and, indeed, one of the most interesting creations in recent fiction, is her father, Captain Ross, a remarkable embodiment of that gritty, reticent Scotch stoicism which it is very difficult to appreciate in real life, and which it is almost impossible to reproduce in a novel. Captain, or "Laird," Ross is at bottom a good-hearted man, with an abrupt, almost uncivil manner. He is utterly unable to express his feelings. It is thus that he bids farewell to his daughter when she goes to England to visit relatives :—

" It was Elsie's last day at home ; she was to start for Edinburgh the next morning, ard she was sitting in the drawing-room writing * A Iferthern Lily. By Joanna Harrison. 3 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. 1836.—A Strange Inheritance. By F. M. none. London and Edinburgh : Blackwood atd Sow. 1886. labels—or libels,' as Bella called them—for her boxes. The day was wet, and the laird had been wandering disconsolately about the house, as his custom was when the weather was unfavourable. He had now come into the drawing-room, and Elsie became aware that his eyes were fixed upon her as she wrote. She looked up, pen in baud; the Laird eyed her fiercely. Did you want anything, papa ?' she asked.—' You're a good creature, Elsie ; your mother was a good creature.' With this remark, delivered with startling abrupt- ness, the Laird bolted out of the room, leaving his daughter too entirely transfixed with astonishment to move or speak. He came back in a minute or two, with a large blue envelope in his hand. 'Have you any money ?' he demanded.—' Not enough for my journey, papa; I was going to ask you for some.'—' Count that,' said the Laird.—Elsie obeyed. 'But—is not this more than I shall need ?'- 'See See that you travel respectably,' said her father. 'I hate your cheap excursions. "

When Elsie dies of fever at her father's house, and it is more than suspected that her death has been brought about by the blundering of her step-mother, or of Lady Eleanor Fitzgerald, the mother of the young man (also now dead) to whom she had engaged herself, we have another and a final glimpse of the Laird :—

" 'My wife means well,' he said ; at least, I suppose so. She came to me with some story about a letter she had written—women cannot hold their tongues—if she spoke of it to you—' Lady Eleanor made an affirmative sign. I wish it to be understood that I blame no one.' The Laird said this with difficulty, as if putting some force upon himself, and choosing his words with great care.—' You are generous, Captain Ross,' said Lady Eleanor.—' While I am upon this subject, which need not be returned to,' he continued, with the same laborious formality, I have some things here which should belong to you.' He opened a desk which he had brought in with him, and placed in Lady Eleanor's hands a ease containing David's watch and the ring which he had given to Elsie. Theo, without giving her time to speak, he looked at the clock, and, muttering that he had some business to attend to which would detain him till dinner-time, and that he would send down Euphemia, he hastily left the room. Except at meals and at the moment of her departure from Roasie the next day, Lady Eleanor saw no more of the Laird. He was polite to her, and behaved to his wife with studied gentleness, evidently putting some strong restraint upon himself. As she drove away, and left him standing upon the steps' something in his figure and look brought tears into her eyes. They never met again ; but Lady Eleanor always speaks of the Laird of Rossi° with deep regard, almost with reverence."

Unless one has met such another as Captain Ross, one is inclined to regard him as a caricature of Scotch stoicism.

But he is not ; the value of his portraiture lies in its fidelity to nature.

A Northern Lily may be termed a tragedy, but it can hardly be termed a novel in the ordinary sense. Miss Harrison—is this her first venture in fiction, by the way P--describes her story, with one of those touches of Thackerayan sarcasm which are to be found here and there in it, as "Five Years of an Uneventful

Life." Certainly there is but little plot in A Northern Lily, Elsie Ross leaves her father's house in Scotland, on her father's con- tracting a second marriage, to visit a grand-uncle in England. She meets with various people, mostly foolish or selfish, and ultimately with David Lindsay, an officer and a relative. They drift into love and betrothal. But David is killed, and Elsie, after refusing to marry Lionel, David's brother, returns to her father's house to nurse her step-mother's children out of "the fever." She herself takes "the fever," and dies. That is all. For the rest, A Northern Lily is a series of social sketches not only of life at Chippingham in England, where the Lindsays reside, but in the North of Scot- land and in Edinburgh, where she pauses on her way South. Some of these sketches are very good, notably Mrs. Lindsay, the wife of Elsie's grand-uncle, who is afflicted with religiosity of an ultra- severe type, and Lady Eleanor Fitzgerald, David Lindsay's mother—at once a woman of the world and a worldly woman— who has for her second husband a valetudinarian Irishman. Poor Elsie manages, during her five uneventful years as "a lily among thorns," to influence for good almost everybody she meets, not be- cause she seta herself deliberately to exert influence, but merely because she is what her father terms her, "a good creature," and is unconscious that she is good. She is especially valuable, from this moral point of view, to Rosamond Seathwaite, afterwards Rosa- mond Ponsonby, who, when we are first introduced to her, is most unhappily married. There are some quietly comic Highland scenes in A Northern Lily, and a family of the name of McNab is remarkably well sketched as a group. In every respect A Northern Lily is deserving of high commendation.

A Strange Inheritance is a novel of a very different stamp from A Northern Lily. Plot in it is everything ; plot in A Northern Lily is absolutely nothing. Hugh Malcolm, of Danree, is, owing to his uncle's hatred of his father for hnving baulked his vindictive passion, deprived of the estate that is his of natural right, and left nothing but the family burying-place.

It is the unravelling by Malcolm of the mystery of his "strange inheritance" that constitutes Mr. Skene's story. He does this unravelling very, skilfully, and keeps his characters moving— in particular a recluse accused of murder, and his beautiful, but not robust daughter—with almost melodramatic rapidity. The beet portrait in the story is that of Carrick, a gamekeeper, who is entrusted by Malcolm's uncle with the task of hunting down this recluse, Duncan Graham by name, for having acci- dentally shot Rose Delacour, for whose hand he (the uncle) and Graham had been rivals. Carrick has a private vendetta against Graham as well, and manages to mix up his private hatred with his desire to bring a murderer—as he conceives Graham to be—to justice, as only a Scotch fanatic can. Not less Scotch is his repentance. Mr. Skene evidently sets great store by Walter Seton, who, in A Strange Inheritance, figures as Hugh Malcolm's, and, indeed, everybody's Providence, and who is a sort of compound of Marcus Aurelius and Monte Christo. We confess, however, that Seton gets rather tiresome. Nor is Mr. Skene strong as regards the comic element of his story, which is mainly contributed by Hugh Malcolm's English friend, Digby Harcourt. Digby is too light a horseman for so heavy a story. The Seton sisters are, however, brightly sketched; and, when its special character is borne in mind, A Strange Inheritance must be regarded as a superior novel. The English in which it is written is also much above that of ordinary fiction, and so is the Scotch dialect that is reproduced in it.