EGLANTINE.* WE have a great respect for Eglantine—the flower, and

the young lady who is called after the flower, and the book that is called after the young lady. But we sigh when we think that love will not accompany respect in our fallen nature, and that all the good qualities in a person or a book do not insure a hearty liking. Now Eglantine. the young lady—to whom is most un- necessarily given the pet name of " Tyne," with a y—is a very good girl, and with a sufficient spice of self-will and high spirit to have made an attractive heroine ; but her good aunt, who thought she was going to tell us about her, and whose intentions, we are sure, were of the very best, could not keep off herself ; so that Eglantine is only one flower in the posy presented to us, the others being apparently Michaelmas daisies, night-scented stocks, and evergreens. It seems just a little unkind of Aunt Dorothy, after writing so feelingly about the neutral tints of her life, and the grey shadows that have fallen over it, and the colourless sameness of its uneventful routine, and after confessing that "few women have

had a more humdrum experience or less incident to record," to alleviate her own sufferings by inflicting them upon us. It is taking rather a mean advantage of us, particularly as we should have agreed eagerly with her views on the absence of any elements of interest in her uneventful life, had she given us an opportunity of doing so before committing them to paper. It is very edifying to know that ladies who have had small-pox, and are deeply pitted, resign themselves in a loving spirit, and recognise the fact that the humblest sphere has its modest plea- sures, and that there is a silver lining to the cloud, and that they always wished to be their father's sole comfort and to be first with him, and that now they shall be so ; and it is nice, as they wish it, that they should have such ample opportunities of studying his calm wisdom, and unselfish, unambitious simplicity, and of hearing about his "thought-life," and of feeling quite sure that no other man could have reached the ideal which their great and gentle father had created ; and yet it seems to us that these views are not unfamiliar, and that neither they, nor the every- day events which suggest and illustrate them, are sufficient material for an interesting story.

While the authoress of St. Olave's—as we have lately borne witness in these pages—has proved herself so great in books for children, she does not strike us as improving as a writer for grown-up children. Her present work, though equal in thought- fulness and character-drawing to her last—The Blue Ribbon—is far behind it in interest. It has assumed the form—favourite with authoresses, but not with readers—of autobiography, which gives such lamentable scope for melancholy lucubrations in a minor key, for long-winded moral disquisition, for sentimental hero-worship, and for that self-depreciation which speaks more eloquently of an underlying complacency than of genuine modesty. It is almost entirely without incident, and its movement is in so small a circle that even the study of charac-

ter is of the most limited kind. In facti the story illustrates what we said in a recent notice about the very sensible writers who are so anxious that everything should be natural, that they fall into the opposite extreme of making everything common- place. We are reminded also, too forcibly, of the style of John - Ralifax, Gentleman, which we are very far from valuing properly. We never were very anxious to know what " John and I" said and did in that much admired production, and " My Mother and 1" disagreed beyond hope of possible appreciation. The follow- ing passage has many counterparts in the voluminous writings of Miss Muloch, and other ladies who are partial to the biographical form :— "I am writing this story to keep the past in my possession, to preserve

those little bits of memory's mosaic-work which might slip out and

• Boantine. By the Author of " 8t. Olave's." 8 vole. London: Hurst and Blackett. leave the picture of my life imperfect. But I can never forget that month, and so I need not write about it. I remember every day of it, from first to last. I never watch the south headland put on its purple glory without thinking how once I watched it with Mr. Morrison. I never rest on the old pear-tree stump without recalling pleasant talks we have had there in the old times. I never look up and down the long coast-lire, north and south, past the dark chasm of Cowan's rift, and away to the soft blue haze of the Northumbrian forelands, without feeling again the touch of remembered hands, and listening to the voice which makes my life beautiful for me. So I will say no more. For the first words of love to which we carp to listen, like the first prayer we learned, or the last kiss which we took from dying lips, never pass out of our lives."

One more complaint we have to make, besides those of dullness and sentimentality, and that is, of a curious prejudice—for a person full of sensible and liberal views, and of candid and Christian feelings—against the trading class, which we remember we noticed in The Blue Ribbon also. The trading class is always stuck-up, illiberal, vulgar, ostentatious, and selfish. Some veins of coal are discovered near our autobiographer's pretty, quiet, sleepy, East-coast village—the scene of her story—and not only are the capitalists, who open them out and are thus instrumental in turning the beloved retreat into a sort of Black Country, all the bad things we have mentioned, and their artisans and labourers all the bad things we should not like to mention, but our authoress preaches the selfish doctrine over and over again that the old inhabitants have no duties towards the new-corners, and ought not to be asked to help in the work of sanitary and benevolent and Christian reform that rapidly becomes imperative amongst the low and crowded population. Aunt Dora's favourite, a "rough old salt," having repulsed alike the cajoleries and threats of the impertinent lady-collector, thus sums up the arguments against subscribing to this work, evidently to our authoress's satisfaction :— " Never mind that, Miss Dora. I know what I think about myself, and so it don't matter a deal what other folks thinks about me. She'll none come here again in a hurry, with her chatter about sixpences and responsibilities; as if I hadn't lived here long enough to know that them as carts rubbish has the best right to keep it decently covered where they've shot it down. Let every man look after his own patch of ground—that's what I say."

We can understand the love that cannot bear to see the dear old place desecrated, and the reserve that shrinks from invaders, and the refinement that is wounded by vulgarity and pretension, but these qualities seem precisely those which should accompany a depth and breadth of true Christian charity. This is never in greater danger than when our sense of natural, moral, and spiritual beauty is outraged,—when we feel impelled to say bitterly, though not unnaturally, such a silly thing as this :—" I mourned over the pleasant corn-fields, and the sweet country lanes, and the fair, bright faces of the cottage-children, which had all been swept away, that men might dig wealth out of the heart of their mother Earth, instead of resting peacefully upon her bosom." But if we are too serious about our authoress's bitterness against trade and its evils, it is because she is generally so sensible, far- sighted, and liberal. Her book abounds with abort passages of thoughtful observation, shrewd sense, high principle, and good- humoured sarcasm ; and of healthy sentiment, too—as distinguished from what we have designated sentimentality—such as this

There is nothing better than the power to love, even though its fulfilled sweetness never comes in this life. For it is the atmosphere which makes the soul capable of receiving light, it is the subtle ether which forms the communication between the human and the divine. In it everything that is good may grow ; and giving, it asks for nothing again."

Or this :— " There is something to me pleasanter than words can tell, in pre- paring a home where nearly everything is the work of one's own hands ; and loving economy, instead of an unlimited balance at the banker's produces order and beauty I think there is nothing so beautiful as living all one's life under the shadow of the same memories, keeping the past in continual possession by actual presence, if not of the old friends—for they must go to their own place—at least of the things which the old friends loved. I cannot understand the pride which some people seem to take in having their houses entirely re-furnished every ten or a dozen years, and casting away from them into the dirt and dis- comfort of second-band shops things which dead parents or husbands or wives once loved and used. There is something to me drearily uncom- fortable in removing to a bigger house at every favourable turn in one's income, and selling one's old acquaintances, and starting afresh upon a blank expanse of unmemoried gilding and damask. Such changes may be indicative of mach outward prosperity, but they rob home of its sacredness, and reduce the past to a series of dissolving views, wherein furniture-vans and upholsterers form the chief points of interest."

Our authoress is amusing where she speaks of the old Tory pro- prietor " discouraging Dissenters and other public improvements," and her smile at High-Church puerility, as compared with the manliness of other professions, is not bad ; it is attributed to the old Coastguardsman

" Yes, Miss Dora, and men and women going down alive into the pit all the time, if what they say is true, and they can find nothing better to do than quarrel about a bit of ribbon. And that's what makes a many of us unlearned folks as we don't care to listen to 'em, nor be taught by 'em, when they can spend their time over such-like, when we've as much as we can do to feed our bodies and save our souls alive. Why, Miss Dora, what should we say if the magistrates, and judges, and lawyers, and them there was to start fighting about how long their robes should be, and whether they might put a dab of colour here, and a spot of gold there, and if their wigs was to be worn with curls or without 'em, while nobody could get justice done him or wrong punished ? There'd soon be a stop put to it, and we should say they were nought but a parcel of schoolboys, to spend their time over such-like nonsense. And that's what I say of the capes and the petticoats, Miss Dora, and the sooner we've done with them the better."

All the characters are well drawn and well sustained, except when the class-prejudice or morbid sentiment we have spoken of tempts to exaggeration ; and none are better than those of the lady patroness, Mrs. Ullathorne, and her little "Birdie," who is rather an elderly little birdie, but who is sent, by way of subtle flattery, to be influenced by Aunt Dora's wisdom and virtue. The scene is very amusing, and the thought sound

"She came very early, that being part of the arrangement, that she might have a quiet time with me before tea, when Mr. Elphinston would most probably make his appearance. She looked fashionable enough in our quaint old sitting-room, though I think she had tried to dress her- self rather simply, as became a girl who wished to be seriously in- fluenced by a very sober, unworldly person. She dropped down at once on a foot-stool at my knee, and looked up at me as if she was quite ready for me to begin at any time. It made me feel very much as if I were acting in a charade, because to talk about anything beyond surface matters requires one to be in a certain sympathetic mood, and I was in no mood at all, except that of seeing the ludicrous side of the situation. I had not even the satisfaction of feeling that Birdie was in earnest, which would have given me just enough interest to talk myself out a little to her. There was something so premeditated about the whole thing. Still more I felt like acting a charade when, finding that I spoke about nothing more serious at first than the weather and the pretty pattern of the case in which she had brought her crochet-work, she looked up appealingly into my face, and began to put me through a series of questions, something like those in manuals for self-examination. Did I not find it very hard to be good? Wasn't it a dreadfully difficult thing to keep one's thoughts right? Did I think it proper to go to parties during Lent ? And when I gave what I considered moderately lenient answers, so as not to make the path of rectitude quite 'too high

For sinful man below the sky,'

she would clasp her hands and say, ' Oh, Miss Leslie, you are so good. I do wonder how ever you came to be so good. Do tell me a great deal about yourself. I am so dreadfully sorry I did not begin to know you a great while ago. Only, you know, I thought you never could have patience to talk to a stupid little thing like me.' The unreality of it all became more and more curious to me. I felt as if I were putting on a part—making myself appear quite a different person. I think you must be conscious of a certain sort of sympathy, however slight,between yourself and your companion, before you can speak what is absolutely true to your own deepest feelings, about anything. Birdie kept me talking to her in that artificial way for fully half an hour, daring the whole of which time I had the strangest sense of appearing to her quite unlike what I knew myself to be. My own thoughts, so far as I could find words for them at all, were, in a sense, truly expressed ; but the medium which her essentially different nature created between us dis- torted them so, that I knew they must appear to her as different as possible from what they were when they left my own mind."

But the book, which is a tediously long one—as a three-volume autobiography of a "humdrum" life must be—depends for its interest mainly, almost solely, on short and isolated passages of description, observation, thought, and humour, which, admirable as they are, do not require and cannot excuse a dull story on which to string them together. We should rejoice if we could succeed in persuading the authoress of St. Olave's to give up autobiography in future, and to use her respectable powers upon a tale of really lively interest.