THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.* MRS. LYNN Lwrow is clever,

but her stories leave a bad flavour in the mouth. Her powers of description are quite above the average, her men and women are alive, and the dialogue is always easy ; but one is never without the sense that the authoress be- lieves society rotten to the very core ; that the ordinary men and women one must perforce meet every day are steeped to the lips in hypocrisy, more or less consciously; and that the criminal class is the class alone really capable of the higher flights of goodness or the nobler forms of self-abnegation. In the story before us, we have five families living "in one of the loveliest places to be found in England." Mrs. Lynn Linton describes scenery well, and North Aston is a place pleasant to contemplate, where "up the valley the high lands broadened into a breezy moor, purple with heath and heather, peopled with bird and beast, whence could be seen things as in a dream—perceived, but not belonging —the spires of cities and the smoke of distant railroads while below were the green pastures, where herds of kine, sedate and ruminant, stood knee-deep in quiet pools, or stood by the meadow-gates lowing for the milking-pails." Fields of yellowing grain and hedges, which in summer were sweet with roses and woodbine, stately forest-trees and rare birds, all go to make up one of those scenes which the Englishman knows so well, and associates, we hope, generally (with a few drawbacks, no doubt) with all he values most of home life. In Mrs. Linton's hands,—

" Every prospect pleases, and only man is vile."

For in this place, "which poets love to write of and artists to de- lineate," "the poor, stagnating in mind and fortune, live, toil, and die, very little removed from the beasts they pasture," while the "wives and daughters of the resident gentry beat themselves like birds against the wires of their cages, spending half their lives in bewailing the dullness of the other half." We are not for a moment to suppose that drunkenness, bad drainage, and over- crowded cottages, three fruitful sources of evil in many a pic- turesque hamlet, were the causes at work here to produce "the pinched and deadened lives" of which Mrs. Linton speaks. On the contrary, North Aston "had as much the perfection of rustic order as of rustic beauty." "It had neither village rowdyism nor village immorality." They (the villagers) were simply "strangled in the grasp of superiority. They had not energy enough to be vicious, certainly not energy enough to be dis- contented." The superiority which extinguishes immorality and discontent, even by a process of strangulation, ought at least to be of a very active and vigorous kind, but we find the shepherd of this somewhat peculiar flock a man by no means dis- posed to be too solicitous about his work,—an easy-going man, "doing his duty in a perfunctory and spiritless way, satisfied with peace, and never seeking after improvement." Nor was it some village Mrs. Proudie who ruled these down-trodden people, for the rector's wife was a placid, sweet-tempered, inactive woman, with a habit of being five minutes too late. There is but one child in the rectory, "a girl of soft manners and determined purpose, whose gloves of velvet triple-pile covered hands of steel tougher than Bessemer's." The second of the five families which constituted " society " in North Aston included a mother, whom Mrs. Linton regards as the typical British country matron, narrow, strict, innocent of the real world in which she lives; three daughters over thirty, lean, faded, and "regarding tobacco as a vice, and

• The Atonement of Leant Dundae. By E. Lynn Linton. London: Chatto and Windua. 1876.

whist for five-shillings points as a sin almost as heinous as the advocacy of cremation." A large family of the Fairbairns, "healthy, open-air, breezy sort of folks," are also hard and narrow. And into this paradise Mr. Dundas, an English country gentleman, fair and handsome, has introduced a superbly beautiful Spanish woman, with the face of a sibyl, the temper of a fiend, the habits of a savage, and ignorance to correspond. Most clever is Mrs. Linton's description of this Nieman, "who has her uses in keeping

North Aston alive, and affording ceaseless occasions for talk --nd speculation." Her husband's dream of love for her had been over long ago, and she hated him as Spaniards can hate, with a persistency their daily life together did not tend to diminish.

But if she hates her husband even to the point of dressing dolls like the Devil, and then teaching her little daughter to call such doll, "El senor papa," she is, nevertheless, capable of being exceedingly jealous of him, and she is not long without occasion, for upon the scene in this quiet English village appears a certain Madame la Marquise de Montfort, a needy adventuress and ex- nursery-maid. In her championship of serving-maids the authoress has probably met with some remarkable specimens, but we venture to think, happily, few before whom all the world would bow down as the North-Aston world bowed to Madame de Montfort. Indeed, we wonder that even the glamour the incident of service throws over her heroine should have made Mrs. Linton not perceive that duller wits than those of North Aston would have detected Madame de Montfort. The wife of a French Marquis, who has passed much of her life in Spain, and in sweetest accents states she has forgotten her "Castilian," ahould not write "appollogies "in her notes, or make glaring gram-

matical blunders in her speech. However, she is pretty, beautiful as dye, and paint, and pretty manners can make her, and the village pastor "smiles upon her with fatherly affection and ,official satisfaction commingled." Spanish Pepita dies of mad jealousy, and Mt. Dundas marries the adventuress.

And here begins the true tale, the veritable tragedy, —a tragedy, we think, which should never have been written, but which has been, and probably will be, widely read. Learn Dundas, the child of Pepita, loves her mother with the intensity which comes of un- &tided thought She is fifteen, ignorant, beautiful, and whether false or truthful we can hardly tell, since we read in one page of her asking, what good truth does? "One tells lies," she says, "when one must," and one must very often ; and then, in another, she will not listen to one of Scott's novels because it is not true, saying proudly, ' I did not come here to Eaten to lies. Mamma did not tell lies!" This girl, like "a pomegranate-bud," gives promise of a splendid future.

She is to Alick Corfield "a girl-queen, an unread poem." As we have said, she was but fifteen when she loses her mother, and Mr.

Dundas marries Madame de Montfort. The child's whole soul is bent on avenging the injury done, as she considers, to her Mother. She learns from Ali& Corfield the secret of some poisons, and that they will kill, and in less than a month after her father's marriage she poisons her stepmother secretly, and with such fatal skill as to escape suspicion. In the years which follow she

goes to school ; conscience is awakened, and remorse. Her life -thenceforth is a miserable struggle to make atonement. She loves a man to whom she remembers her story must be told, and when it effectually separates her from him she leaves home for ever ; in a

distant part of the country she meets once more her lover, discovers he is married, and dies. We have given the story as critics can, making that ugly and repulsive which in the writer's hands is full of mournful beauty and tragic interest ? Quite so ; the point is, after all, what are the facts of the case, and what are the limits of art? First, as to the facts, we will give, in the authoress's own words, the circumstances which led up to that which she is pleased to designate " Leam's loving crime." Before Madame de Montfort becomes her stepmother, she is for awhile her governess, and this is the relation which exists between them :—

" Meanwhile Learn underwent a daily- torture, the effect of which was to harden her more and more to the world outside, Nt hile driving her deeper into that recess where was her stronghold. She hated her lessons, not because they were lessons, but because they were things which mamma had not taught her and would have laughed to scorn had she heard. It seemed to her an injury to mamma that she should learn all these funny things about places and people, the stars and the animals, that Madame read to her from ugly little books, and that mamma had never known. But what could she do? It was to no good that she sometimes ran away and hid for a whole day in one special part of Steel's Wood, braving the unknown perils of wild beasts and armed banditti to be found therein' if only she might escape Madame. She thought she would rather run the danger of being devoured by the wolves and lions which she had not a doubt made their home in the dark parts of the wood, or of being carried off by the brigands who lived in the caves, than go to Madame to feel that her mother was being insulted when unable to avenge herself, and that she, her little Lsami her own sweet Heart, had joined hands in the blow! Still, running- away was of no avail. To escape one day out of seven or eight might be a gain of so many hours, but the permanent arrangement held fast. That went on whether she braved the perils of the wild beasts and armed banditti or not ; and the only result of her absence to-day was to be taken personally in deep disgrace by her father to-morrow, scolded all the way there, and received by Madame with maddening friend- liness at the end. Learn thought she could have borne it better had Madame been cold and severe rather than so uniformly caressing and amiable. Had she rated her or even beaten her as her mother used to do, she would have been less reluctant, because she would have had something tangible to go on. As it was, she felt as if fighting with a cloud : and the plentiful outpost of honey in exchange for her own gall sickened her. That pleasant smile, those endearing words, that inexhaustible patience, revolted the girl, who saw in her smooth-faced ' governess ' only the woman whom her mother had distrusted and dis- liked. For herself personally, without these haunting reminiscences, she would have liked Madame well enough; but now—it would be un- faithful to mamma ; and Learn could not be that! Living as she did in the one ever active thought of her mother's unseen presence and continued existence, the influence of the past was never weakened ; and. Leam's heart clung to the mother unseen as the little arms used to cling round her in the days of her bodily existence."

We appeal to honest sense if it be within the fair range of art to make this attitude of mind in a young child, otherwise innocent, lead up to murder, and murder to be regarded in her mind thus?—

" Leam, standing upright in her room, in her clinging white night- dress, her dark hair hanging to her knees, her small brown feet bare above the ankle, not trembling, but tense, listening, her heart on fire, her whole being as it were pressed together, concentrated on the one thought, the one purpose, hoard the words passed from lip to lip. 'Dead,' they said ; dead 1' Lifting up her rapt face, and raising her outstretched arms high above her head, with no sense of sin, no con- sciousness of cruelty, only with the feeling of having done that thing which had been laid on her to do—of having satisfied and avenged her mother—she cried aloud in a voice deepened by the pathos of her love, the passion of her deed, into an exultant hymn of sacrifice : 'Mamma, are you happy now? Mamma! mamma! leave off crying,—there is no one in your place now The "place," be it remembered, being the one place which, as Learn knew, her mother hated and despised. We are thankful that within our range of fiction we have never come upon anything quite so horrible as this. To conceive of madness or of badness is one thing. Young criminals guilty of fierce crimes have existed, unhappily, before to-day, but to picture deliberately a young and innocent girl, of fine origiaa nature and at least one intense affection, studying to grasp a secret which should enable her to perpetrate undiscovered a deadly crime, with no warning instinct to hold her back from the act which life cannot expiate, no sense of guilt, of pity, or even fear, to deter her from the fatal deed, would, if it came within the region of facts, give colour to the creed of devil-worship. Things abnormal are not better in art than they are in nature. They are apt to become monstrosities in either. Having created Learn, the authoress does well to pity her, but we venture to hope she may in the future turn talents of no mean order to some subject less calculated to revolt the healthiest instincts of humanity.