BARBARA HEATHCOTE'S TRIAL.*

Ir is nearly two years since we last laid down a novel of Miss Carey's, and though we recognize iu the book before us—by some very marked characteristics of style—the same hand that penned that marvel of romance Wee Witte, yet Miss Carey is greatly im- proved. If she were a little girl, and we had the opportunity, we would pat her very much ou the head, and speak very encouraging words to her, and praise her industry and per- severance. What has become of all those flourishes and fancies, and marvellous adventures and high-flown sentiments, that whisked about so energetically to elaborate that wonderful creation Wee [VIA? Miss Carey has pruned away with a wise ruthlessness the wild and vagrant abundance of her luxuriant fancy, which turned the garden of her imagination into a thicket, and has nur- tured instead the plants, not less graceful in form, and far more beautiful and various in harmonious colouring, that spring from a grave and thoughtful study of nature as she really is. Miss Carey has deserted her princely palaces, turned her back on her tran- scendent beauties and a cold-shoulder to her romantic knights, and will have nothing to say to impetuous griefs and painful adventure,—hidings, and seekings, and findings,—unheard-of faithfulness or inconceivable villany. Not, of course, that the story is entirely without feminine beauty and loving credu- lity on the one hand, or selfishness and sin on the other —it would not be a story if it were—but that these are administered in ends quantities as do not rouse in rebellion our reason and experience. We should feel pleased to think that any * Barbara Ileathcote's Trial, By Rosa Nouchotto Carey, London: Tinsley. remarks of ours had helped to work this change—for Miss Carey is worth advising—but we fear that even the bravest and humblest nature would turn uninfluenced from censure so little qualified as that with which we felt obliged to criticize the work we have spoken of. But iu bad grammar and defective English, in the small affectations and gushing phrases,—the " hands like crushed lilies," and that sort of thing, alas there is little alteration. Barbara Heathcote is a plain little creature—we are sorry to hear that she has a " full throat,"—who only once in the course of the story leaves her native village, for she and her fellow-actors are not now driven or dragged madly about the world, but are allowed, nearly without exception, to live out their little day, peaceably or other- wise, at Sunningford. Her character is truthfully conceived and skilfully and beautifully drawn, and all who read the account of her years of trial would be inclined to love the saucy, affectionate, brave, high-principled Barbara almost as much as the two Mr. Straths did, if Miss Carey would but let her alone a little more, and allow her actions and herself to speak for themselves. But she cannot " let her be," as the expressive North-country phrase has it. She must be at the old trick of consulting her readers about her, of deprecating their displeasure, of placing her and her thoughts in various lights and positions, and of dealing playfully with her name,—producing a dozen names out of it, and fingering them through the ascending scale of Bab, Baby, Babchen, Barbara, and Barbarina mia. Then, too, we hear in- cessantly of the soft grey dress and the little brown face—some- times " puckered," or " more puckered up than ever"—and her dancing kind of step, with which " her little twinkling feet were literally flitting over the daisy grass," is dwelt upon ; sometimes it is " hoppity," then " hoppety," then " hoppity " again, but the relation of the e and the i to the variation in the movement is not explained. Her hair, however, is apparently considered by Miss Carey as her heroine's chief personal characteristic, and we never get to the end of it, though it appears to have been shot enough. According either to Barbara's mood or Miss Carey's, we can't quite make out which, this hair "rippled quite fiercely," or consisted of "crazy ripples," or " turbulent little waves," or was " a forest of ripples," or "a mop in convulsions," or "a furze-bush," or "a little brown wig," or " beautiful erCipSi hair." The "forest of ripples," by the way, is an emanation of true genius—it unites so deliciously the bright movement of ocean with the shade and silence of summer woods—but the idea should be caught at a glance—it loses, perhaps, by close inspection—it is difficult with satisfaction to follow the edge of the tide to the tops of the trees.

But when Miss Carey has torn herself away, and we get Barbara alone, or at auy rate only in her own natural character, she is very charming indeed, Her warns partizanship, her immolation of self when those she loves can be served—though their selfishness in allowing her so to sacrifice herself is quite apparent to her and rouses her quiet scorn—her impatience of benevolent parish work and of all " goody " talk or behaviour, and yet her cheerful self- acknowledged admiration of her own heroic qualities, are all faith- fully life-like and delightful and amusing. One of her crusades is against her sister's marriage with a neighbouring baronet, because she knows there is no love on either side, and that the poor fellow is hopelessly in love with a sickly little friend, who she is sure returns this devotion. She enters the lists, and while he escorts her home, tells him an imaginary story which elicits an honest statement of his difficulties :- " Barbara felt genuine respect and affection for him 'You're a noble creature, Geoffrey.'—' And yet you called use a hypocrite just now.' Barbara winced. Somehow her speeches never sounded so well from any other mouth as from her own. 'Only as long as you refuse to tell the truth. It is cowardly to keep it back,—mean, dishonourable to Hes- ter.'—' What am Ito do ? ' he said, hopelessly. My mother has talked me into it, and now it is too late, I cannot go back from my word.'— Perhaps not,' returned Barbara, haughtily. You must put the true state of the ease before Hester, and if she is willing to marry you, of course she must do so ; but to tell you a bit of my mind,' continued Bab, frankly, ' I think she would rather cut her throat first than so demean herself ; and if she wouldn't, I would do it for her, and with pleasure,' nod- ding fiercely.—' She will be awfully angry. It's all very well to tell me to do it ; but however I am to screw my courage up ' and Sir Geoffrey looked about as miserable as a man could look.—' Well, you see that's your affair. I don't moan to be unfeeling, Geoffrey ; but you've got yourself into this scrape, and you owe it to Nest to get her and yourself out of it as quickly as you can. I don't think I can help you there, because, though Nest is my friend, Heater is my sister Barbara felt quite a heroine when else returned home. Heroines always get in- volved in a great many difficulties, she thought, and are always extricat- ing themselves and other people in a most marvellous way. She felt very uncomfortable, of course ; but then, no doubt other heroines felt themselves uncomfortable too, An inconvenient notion seized her, that Hester might not be specially grateful to her for her Interference. ' Small moddlinge are dangerous things,' sighed. Bab, coining a new pro- verb for the occasion ; but she was very much inflated, for all that,—a feeling, by the bye, that she lost the moment she found herself in Hes-

ter's presence. Hester looked up, and greeted her quite brightly when

she entered How very cheerful she is,' groaned poor Bab ; so very ehoorful,—talkative too. I wish I were out of this ; ' and she felt like a conspirator plotting against hor sister's happiness. Could over any of her defunct heroines have felt HO very uncomfortable ? "

Nevertheless she, who would not let her sister violate truth by marrying without love though she had a sincere and not very un- common desire for a good husband and a handsome menage—love or no love,—engages herself, in the full knowledge that she loved another and that her love was returned, in order to secure her father's freedom from debt and her brother's position in the world. This incident, which is in fact the central interest, is also the glaring defect of the story, because the consistency of Barbara's shrewd, sensible, honourable nature is violated, —she who believed in no make-shifts, in no success of outraged truth, in no triumphs unless in straightforward manly struggles with the difficulties to be encount- ered, could not in the first place have allowed money complications, even her father's, to involve her in immediate falsehood and a. whole life of deceit and acting ; nor, in the second place, have

been so blind to the barefaced sophistry and consummate selfish- ness of her lover, who could as easily have helped the father and brother in their character of intimate friends as in that of

merely relations by law, and whose proposal is simply bribery and cruelty of the most heartless kind. To make Barbara continue to believe in his great generosity is absurd ; and it is an insult to the understanding of the reader to affect to pass over this conduct without perceiving its iniquity. Indeed Nigel Strath's character, which is the most ambitious, and saving this illustration of it, would perhaps be also the moat successful sketch, is spoilt by this exaggerated selfishness in the use which lie makes of his oppor- tunities. His arbitrary, irritable, fastidious nature is, otherwise, controlled by a noble generosity and a rigid regard for good faith. Setting aside this defect, and a very abnormal con- scientiousness in regarding a boyish vow shown by the other Strath, the plot is as simple and natural a one as we have any right to expect in a modern novel. Two cousins love Barbara.

Nigel is rich, and Norman is poor but rising ; but Norman did Nigel, in their boyhood, a serious but unintentional injury, and vowed he would, if he had the opportunity, do him some great good, and so leaves the field to him. In the sequel, Barbara very

properly lectures him for so coolly disregarding her in the matter :—

" A more girl's fancy! oh, it was like your man's wisdom! no, don't speak to me, I cannot bear it. Who would have thought that you could

have treated mo so ungenerously?'—' My dearest, hush No, I am not your dearest, not yours or any other man's,—you are all alike, all ; you could do this grand thing for him, and never dream that your sali- ency/Ike involved mine also ; when you told me you could never marry, did you not render me dumb before you? was I not as helpless stud tongue-tied as ever you could wish me to be ?'—' I wish you,—oh,

Barbara ! ]'Cell, eau girls tell their love? Should I not have interfered with your fine plan for snaking yourself miserable? you want me to praise this generous deed of yours, but I will not. I told you then, that I did not think you right to leave Sunningford, you were turning your back on those poor people; beeanso they wore ignorant, and slandered you you were hard upon them, and so you went away with a slur on your name, instead of living it down, and that's what I call cowardly, Norman.' —` Very cowardly, if I bad left only for that reason, Barbars.'—' Ah I but you were just as mistaken in the other thing. You took the trouble to be kind to me, and win my heart, and then you treated it as a girl's fancy, and left mo to Nigel. Do you know now to what you left me, and how ho made me do the wrong I hated, for my father's sake ? '—' My noble Barbara!'—' No, it was not noble, it was a lie, and I hate lies ; I glossed it over to myself by thinking that I loved him a little, and might love him more, and that it could not be wrong to Have a father's life ; but how all these months I have despised myself, seeing suyself so decked out and caressed I' " Many of the other characters are very good. Norman is of the hard, self-sufficient, self-made martyr stamp ; Geoffrey of the helpless, good-natured kind. Hester is a very true picture of the matter-of-fact, sensible woman, with beauty that wins admiration, but with a reticent nature that is sparing in making a return. The reckless self-indulgent Leigh is a good but too random sketch, and the old doctor is rather too much of a lay figure for producing stage-like effect of the " bless you, my children," sort ; as when he receives back the prodigal Leigh, or hears of the up-

shot of his mining venture.

But why will Miss Carey disfigure a nice story, and spoil our

interest in well-drawn and clever characters, with floods of namby- pamby ? Imagine a young girl, who feels lonely, sighing herself to sleep with the thought, " It may be that my mate is with the angels." And compare these two passages :—" ' Have pity on her lonely heart, her very, very empty lonely heart,' sobbed Nest " (p. 200) ; and this, " Why, what am I? Why, what am I?

really but a hungry child, a very hungry, lonely child,' sobbed Bab " (p. 284). And what are " dimpling excuses which never get to words "? Apparently they have got to words, and we feel inclined to imitate the "dimpling excuses," and got to words with Miss Carey about them, and about a hundred other passages of sentimental rubbish, And why will she not be careful to use words rightly?—bets do not, for instance, "sip, chalices ;" ou the other hand, young gentlemen, we need not to be told, are "

ventual,"—and why will she not correct her most defective grammar and amusingly bad construction, for instance, " Ah ! if you could look into the heart of many a lonely and gifted one, whose works

have enriched and made you glad what fruitless longings would you read there for baby lips on desolate breasts, whose pen and brush are to be to them home, husband, and children !" We never heard of these peculiar and heterogeneous possessions of breasts.

Well, we must hope for still further improvement, and certainly Barbara Ileathcote's Trial, when compared with Wee Wile, gives us ample reason to believe that our hope will not be in vain.