SPRING NOVELS. * IF books of travels are becoming somewhat trite

and devoid of cha- racter from continual repetition of the same scenes or the same general subjects, how much more is that likely to be the case with novels. In travels, there is reality and nature always; in novels, we have seldom more than convention. Very few travellers make a second book about the same country; novelists are too apt to go on drawing upon the old stores. In either class, an original genius, or some special subject, will produce a book of novelty; but except in such a case, both branches of literature are becoming" weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." Novels the most so, because they are not only less real but come forth in greater numbers. A man must travel to tell his travels • the fictionists, like certain caterpillars, spin from their own inside to meet a continually-recurring demand. Hence our difficulty in dealing with the mass of novels, which if once allowed to pass have a tendency to increase till their numbers al- most defy attention before they become of the things that were. Notwithstinding notes and notices from week to week, the present spring has left a number of " novelties " upon our hands, a part of which we are about to dispose of; not as the best, but as having at least some distinctive character apart from mere manufactures for the libraries.

If Angelo be looked at as the application of old ideas to new circumstances, it may be pronounced a very clever romance. There is a conventional Italian, villanous, revengeful, and a Jesuit, with a strong constitution, an indomitable will, and all the other re- markable qualities that the novelist combines in the Satan of his story. There is his immediate victim, whom he pursues through life on his own account ; there are some other -victims in a second degree, who are followed as well for his "church" as for himself; together with a tale of mystery to be finally unravelled. These elements are well wrought out both in conception and contrivance, though the style is pitched in too rhetorical a key ; but by them- selves they would merely have constituted a clever reproduction of the Radcliffe school. By mixing up the persons of the story with the late Italian revolution, the writer has got a subject new to romance unless when taking the form of history. The exhibition of the unscrupulous character of Romish ecclesiastics, when the in- terests of their church or their own interests and passions are at stake, is not so new a topic as it was aboat the time of the Papal Aggression, but it is still popular. The reader who is satisfied with such elements of fiction as we have indicated will find An- gelo a capital tale after the fashion of The Italian, " adapted," as the playwrights say, to the present age.

Considered in a more critical light, the fiction proceeds upon a wrong principle. The writer does not seem to have any actual knowledge of Italy and the Italians ; and relies altogether upon authorities for the mode of representing the characters of Revolu- tionists or Papists ; one of those authorities being Mr. Baillie Cochrane's Young Italy ! As regards the past, this reliance upon books is unavoidable ; but in contemporary events a writ'ir should have some actual knowledge of the subject he makes a leading feature of his tale, otherwise he will substitute convention for na- ture, and exhibit politics with the hard onesided features which party is apt to ascribe to them, instead of the truth and blended hues of reality. We must make up a portrait of the dead, but we have no right to paint imaginary likenesses of the living. There is thought in Angelo, and the themes admit of its display. This is all we can find room for.

" I was not going to scold, only to hint that there is such a thing as moral discipline—a tonic most needful for our weakly and diseased souls. Out- ward circumstances are indifferent, so that we improve them. Every hour, for instance, which you spend in study now, you will live twice over here- after; every tax that is laid upon your endurance by attrition with others

• Angelo: a Romance of Modern Rome. In two volumes. Published by Bentley. Counterparts; or the Cross of Love. By the Author of "Charles Auchester." In three volumes. Published by Smith, Elder, and Co.

The Professor: a Novel. By Emilie Carlen, Author of " The Events of a Year," &c. In three volumes. Published by Newby. Flora Lyndsay ; or Passages in an Eventful Life. By Mrs. Moodie, Author of "Roughing it in the Bush," &c. &c. In two volumes. Published by Bentley.

will be more than redeemed by the force imparted to your own character. Trust yourself, therefore, and confide in the wisdom which sees and ordains the connexion of events. . . . .

' My faith is large in time,

And that which shapes it to some perfect end.'

Of this you may be assured, your uncle has intended to act affectionately and kindly in he matter."

The author of Charles Auchester exhibited in that book great defects with some rather remarkable merits. There was freshness, running, no doubt, into wildness and improbability ; minute finish in the painting of persons and domestic " interiors," apt to de- generate into the tedious except for patient readers with plenty of leisure ; a covert kind of satire, not the less telling for being quiet; and a special taste for music. On the other hand, the defects were of a threatening nature, because they argued an ill-balanced mind, and promised growth. There was a stilted rhetoric ; a dispo- sition to more than exaggerate trifles by hyperbole ; to English tastes a lax disposition as regards social conventions, and a de- vout enthusiasm for musical professors rather than for art, which was ludicrous and verged upon the silly. There was admiration for the Hebrew race, either real or borrowed from Mr. Disraeli, to whom the book was dedicated, as Counterparts, by the same author, is inscribed to Mrs. Disraeli; the admiration was probably imitative, for it was hollow. These faults are developed in Counterparts to a repelling degree ; which renders the book abso- lutely unreadable. The simplest thing, the commonest idea, is in- flated into fustian, sinking occasionally into flat commonplace for a short time, as stage ranters are charged with dropping their voice to recover their "wind." In addition to love and music, medicine and literature are thrust into the story, with thunder and light- ning for what the playhouse calls " properties." The poet of the piece is composing during a tremendous storm. "The thunder was already rolling over the distant sea. Its whisper in dread echoes from the cliff gave no rest to the resounding shore. It came nearer with the moments, yet seemed over the waters to creep with the hours ; for not until two o'clock the tempest burst upon the bay. All the chafed stillness and spell-bound strength broke down at once. The wind was sullen ; in savage agitation it howled down the gulley ; it bowed the lilies on the lawn to the earth. No rain yet fell to assuage the fires of the lightning ; the electric fluid streamed livid, far and wide: the cloud-mask shivered, as the Hashes, yellow and angry red, gushed through the plague-blue tinting that sheeted the sky all over. Nor, as the storm strode nearer and nearer, nor when its fierce heart burst, did the pale young writer pause, or raise his bending head. There was blood in his veins which the thunder could not curdle, and his nerves were soft-sheathed like a sleeping infant's, from sympathies with the lightning. He appeared not even conscious how the elements were defying Nature and raging against her calm. He wrote thus on and on, only pausing now and then as his imagination whispered music too sweet for the poet to utter.

"Suddenly, a flash descended like the forked tongue of some Titan ser- pent, piercing the lantern of the lighthouse. A thunder-stroke fell, not after it but with it, with detonation like a bursting sphere. The strong stone-work shook, a black scrawl shuddered down its side, the lantern was smashed inwards, the lightning quenched the light. A shock that moment seemed to shake creation. The very storm paused tremblingly ; the lambent fires left heaven clear for an instant, and the thunder lulled. The youth perhaps had felt it not, but he had certainly heard it. Flinging down his pen, he crossed to the window, and he was upon the lawn at once. Bare- headed, beneath the storm, he surveyed the stricken symmetry of the light- house. He approached it then over the grassy level: no sound escaped him yet, but he knocked at the narrow door. He waited—he opened it—he ran up the corkscrew staircase, displacing the shattered fragments with his feet; and, standing with the jagged wall broken round him, exclaimed beneath his breath, Thank God I' In answer to that whisper, a voice shouted out from beneath, Mr. Bernard ! Mr. Bernard !' "

A prominent person is Dr. Herz Samna, a Jew physician ; a sort of compound of the wondrous intellect of Sidonia in Coningsby and the fascination of Seraphael in Charles Auchester. He takes home, as patient and companion to his sister, an over-wrought governess from a hard schoolmistress, for whom he promises to obtain pupils as soon as her health is restored. That was a kind thing of the doctor, and very likely in a nervous patient to in- duce a restless night. This is the narrative of Counterparts for such a simple thing.

" That must be for ever.'

"She rose, for he paused: she left the room; but it was impossible for her this night to sleep. She had never passed such a night in her life, and she arose with her despair as a shadow thrown through the world. As a cloud over the whole sky hides the sun, it veiled her pride completely : it occurred to her no more that she was indebted. She dressed she knew not how ; she came down stairs she knew not how ; and into what place she cared not.

"Salome was passing out of the dmwingroom, where she had been calling the housemaid to account for leaving a trail of dust on the frame of a picture. She had a bunch of bright keys on her finger ; their light jingle seemed to pierce Miss Dudleigh as though her brain gaped open beneath a dividing blade."

Enough for specimens of prose run mad. There is a seeming approach to poetical imagery as well as to richness of idea, but they are both overlaid by a "power" of words ; and probably if the writer tried to present them in a more definite shape they would vanish.

The leading element of Emilie Carlen's Professor may be less fa- miliar to the Swedish than the British public; for here we are well acquainted with a rich, odd, quick-tempered, shrewd, sus- picions, but at bottom good-hearted old fellow, who "does good by stealth," and, instead of blushing, gets cross "to find it fame"; the prevention of mercenary marriages, and the union of truly attached but poor young. couples, being the main business for which the old gentleman is called into being. With us, however, he belongs to the stage rather than the novel; and we think that the conception suffers by the Swedish mode of exhibition. On the stage, everything ought to be brisk, active, and full of motion. At all events, a farce or comedy must be comparatively short; so that the reader cannot be wearied by details of manners and com- mon occurrences. In The Professor there is a great deal too much of both for Fnglish taste. The distress or sentiment turns upon matters of a sordid kind. Even in moneymaking England, poverty is allowed to be a legitimate feature in a hero, but its particulars must be kept out of sight. In Sweden, it would seem that a short and seedy garment may be the source of an interest not intended for comics. The costume of the lover, Frank Manner- stedt, is like the appropriated shirt of that diner-out whose adven- tures Munden used to sing of—" too short and too tight,"—and, as may be opined of outgrown garments, somewhat the worse for wear. There is an under-current of good feeling in The Professor, and we dare say a very truthful picture of the daily doings of the principal people in a provincial Swedish town. The feeling, how- ever, is strained—that is, to English apprehension : and the manners have lost the freshness with which they first came upon the reading public, in The Neighbours of Frederika Bremer, a dozen years ago.

The volumes furnish more than the titlepage promises. 2he Professor only occupies some two volumes : the remainder con- tains a translation of Waldennar Klein, which was published separately two or three weeks since, as we noted at the time.

Flora Lyndsay, by Mrs. Moodie, is obviously based upon the writ- er's emigration experiences before quitting England and during the voyage to Canada; and this evident foundation in the actual mili- tates against the success of the fiction. It is very probable that the writer's mind is too much of a matter-of-fact cast to succeed as a novelist; her persons wanting life, her dialogue dramatic spirit, and the whole breadth enough to rise above the literal. But be- yond the troubles of making up the mind to emigrate, and the common incidents of leave-taking, preparation, and the voyage, Flora Lyndsay has no story at all. Told in a straightforward way, the facts, as part of the autobiography of "an eventful life," might have commanded some attention. Treated in the manner of a fic- tion, with minute description of persons, elaborated dialogue, and attempt at creating a broad imaginative interest where none exists, the narrative becomes trilling and fiat. It is given to very few to infuse the attraction of fiction into an individual story. Cooper succeeded in Ned Myers, but he had the variety and adventures of a sea life to deal with.

Elaborated as they are, the distresses of Mrs. Lyndsay about to emigrate cannot be made to fill two volumes, and the space is eked out by a tale called Noah Cotton. Its subject is not of the most refined nature ; being the murder of a father by his natural son in ignorance of the relationship, and the execution of an in- nocent man. The persons and the treatment are for the most part melodramatic. Still, Noah Cotton has what Flora Lyndsay wants —story and incidents.