PH(EBE, JUNIOR.* Tars is a very delightful novel, a little

unequal, as most of Mrs..

Oliphant's stories are, but fuller than usual of her special powers,. —her keen insight into a variety of feminine character—the able bourgeoise—her shrewd observation of English middle-class life,

and her restrained, satirical humour. It betrays, too, what we had scarcely expected to find, a capacity for depicting scenes of

almost tragical emotion without failure, and without the tendency to melodrama Which has so deformed one or two of her books,

especially the very best of them, Salem Chapel, as to give rise to the suspicion that they were written by two people, one with much of the special force of George Eliot, and another an ordinary and slightly sensational novelist There is, however, no trace of double workmanship in Phcebe, Junior, which maintains its interest to the last, and is most life-like in the most exciting

scenes of the third volume. The story is laid once more in Car- lingford, and the heroine is Phoebe, Junior, Phoebe Beecham,

daughter of that Phcebe Tozer, child of the butterman and deacon, who, the readers of Salem Chapel may remember, married the "young man from 'Omerton who made an 'it." Mr. Beecham, the young man in question, has risen in the world, minis- ters to a Regent's Park Chapel and a rich congregation,

has educated his daughter well, and is altogether a prosperous and "liberal" man, with a good heart and a thoroughly snobbish nature. The daughter, Phcebe, is a character Mrs. Oliphant loves to paint,—a thoroughly competent, pretty young woman, with

some taste, much self-control, and as sound a judgment as a thoroughly worldly disposition will allow her to possess. She wants to get on without doing anything very mare, and decides that Clarence Copperhead, the educated but stupid son of an

atrociously vulgar father, who has made a grand fortune in con- tracts, can help her to what she wants. She is just beginning to

attract him, when old Mrs. Tozer, her grandmother and the butter- man's wife, falls ill ; some one must go to Carlingford, and Phoebe, who, with all her intense worldliness, has a strong

notion of duty to everybody but herself, elects to go down. Her surprise at her new position there as the butterman's grand- daughter, her disgust at her surroundings, and her plans for

overcoming her disadvantages are so well described, that we con- tract, as we are meant to do, a sort of liking for the hand- some, high-spirited, competent young woman, though we know all the while, that while half-loving another man, who is thoroughly worthy of her and better than she is, she has resolved to sell herself to Clarence Copperhead, of whose loutishness she is keenly sensible. Perhaps her character and her powers are as well indicated in this little discussion about her dress as in any separate chapter of the book. Mamma Phoebe, who has grown fat, and who, in spite of her promotion in life, is a trifle vulgar, has been invited to a ball at the Copperheads', and wants her daughter to look well " In my time," she says, " fair girls wore greens and blues, and dark girls wore reds and yellows," but as Phoebe, Junior, objects, she suggests a white tarletan, as raiment in which every girl looks well :— " You don't see, mamma,' said Phcebe, softly, suppressing in the most admirable manner the delicate trouble of not being understood, 'that a thing every girl looks well in, is just the sort of thing that no girl looks say well in. White shows no invention. It is as if one took no trouble about one's dress.'—' And neither one ought, Placebo,' said her mother. ' That is very true. It is sinful to waste time thinking of colours and ribbon; when we might be occupied about much more important matters.'—' That is not my opinion at all,' said Phcebe. 'I should like people to think I had taken a great deal of trouble. Think of all the trouble that has been taken to get up this ball I fear so, indeed; and a great deal of expense,' said Mrs. Beecham, shaking her head. 'Yes, when one comes to think of that. But then, you see, wealth has its duties. I don't defend Mr. Copperhead—.'—' I don't think he wants to be defended, mamma. I think it is all nonsense about wasting time. What I incline to, if you won't be shocked, is black.'—' Black The suggestion took away Mrs. Beecham's breath. 'As if you were fifty I Why, I don't consider myself old enough for black.'—' It is a pity,' slid Phcebe, with a glance at her mother's full colours; but that was really of so much less importance. 'Black would/ throw me up,' she added seriously, turning to the glass. ' It would take off this pink look. I don't mind it in the cheek; but I am pink all over ; my white is pink. Black would be a great deal the best for both of ns. It would tone us down,' said Phcebe, decisively, 'and it would throw us up.'—' But for you, a girl under twenty, my dear—.'— ' Mamma, what does it matter? The question is, am I to look my best? which, I think, is my duty to you and to Providence ; or am I just,' said Phcebe, with indignation, to look a little insipidity—a creature with no character—a little girl like everybody else ?'

* Phabe, Junior: a Lail Chronicle of Carlingford. By Mrs. Oliphant. 8 vole. London: Hurst and Blackelt. Of course, Phcebe wears black, and looks charming ; and the same decided and self-dependent judgment distinguishes her in every detail of life,—in her management of her lover, in her grand fight with his father, the rich vulgarian, and in the one greatly good action of her career. It is in describing this action that Mrs. Oliphant rises, we think, quite beyond her usual level. Mr. May, a clergyman with whom Phoebe has made friends, and whose son she secretly loves, pressed by endless pecuniary difficulties, has added Tozer the butterman's name to a bill for £150. The kind of bewilderment, half of guilt, half of delirium, under which he does this is well described ; but when he is discovered, he fairly loses his reason, and rushes out, half-naked, into the street. Phcebe has fought with her grand- father for pardon to the forger, but old Tozer, who does not know the criminal, is nearly mad with rage, accuses her, quite truly, of secreting the bill, and avowedly forgets all the feelings supposed to belong to a Christian deacon. He rejects payment of the money offered by Mr. Northcote,—another of Mrs. Oliphant's sketches of out-of-the-way Dissenting ministers, suggesting Mr. Vincent, in Salem Chapel, but not a repetition of him,—and alto- gether works himself into an executioner's frame of mind, when the guilty man, who has been stopped in his flight as a madman, is brought into the room :— 4" Grandpapa,' said Phcebe in his ear, ' here it is, your bill; it was he who did it—and it has driven him mad. Look ! I give it up to you ; and there he is—that is your work. Now do what you please.' Trem- bling, the old man took the paper out of her hand. He gazed wondering at the other, who somehow moved in his excitement by a sense that the decisive moment had come, stood still too, his arm half pulled out of his coat, his face wild with dread and horror. For a moment they looked at each other in a common agony, neither the one nor the other clear enough to understand, but both feeling that some tremendous crisis had (tome upon them. He—done it !' said Tozer, appalled and almost speechless. 'He done it!' They all crowded round, a circle of scared faces. Phcebe alone stood calm. She was the only one who knew the whole, except the culprit, who understood nothing with that mad con- fusion in his eyes. But he was over-awed too, and in his very madness recognised the crisis. He stood still, struggling no longer, with his eyes fixed upon the homely figure of the old butterman, who stood trem- bling, thunderstruck, with that fatal piece of paper in his hand. Tozer had been mad for revenge two moments before—almost as wild as the guilty man before him—with a fierce desire to punish and make an ex- ample of the man who had wronged him. But this semi-madness was arrested by the sight of the other madman before him, and by the extraordinary shock of this revelation. It took all the strength out of him. He had not looked up to the clergyman as Cotsdean did, but he had looked up to the gentleman his customer, as being upon an eleva- tion very different from his own, altogether above and beyond him ; and the sight of this superior being, thus humbled, maddened, gazing at him with wild terror and agony, more eloquent than any supplication, struck poor old Tozer to the very soul. ' God help us all !' he cried out, with a broken, sobbing voice. He was but a vulgar old fellow, mean it might be, worldly in his way ; but the terrible mystery of human wickedness and guilt prostrated his common soul with as sharp an anguish of pity and shame as could have befallen the most heroic. It seized upon him so that he could say or do nothing more, forcing hot and salt tears up into his old eyes, and shaking him all over with a tremor as of palsy. The scared faces appeared to come closer to Phcebe, to whom these moments seemed like years. Had her trust been vain? Softly, but with an excitement beyond control, she touched him on the arm. That's true,' said Tozer, half crying. 'Something's got to be done. We can't all stand here for ever, Phcebe; it's him as has to be thought of. Show it to him, poor gentleman ! if he ain't past knowing ; and barn it, and let us hear of it no more."

And then, having done it, baying forgiven his enemy,—Mrs. Oli- phant might have added $ touch as to the Christianising effect of his

habitual life as deacon on his mind, but she knows her man better than we do—he turned to Mr. Northcote, "put out his hand, and plucked him by the sleeve, I'll not say no to that money, not now, Mr. Northcote, Sir,' he said." He could forego his revenge in the moment of its gratification, but to be generous when generosity was not particularly necessary—for Northcote was rich—was beyond the

old tradesman's power. Ile could pardon, but not make an avoidable loss. Throughout he is as perfect as in Salem Chapel,

and when Northcote, an educated Dissenting minister, acci- dentally independent, leaves Carlingford, old Tozer's valedictory

speech is nearly as good as his famous oration in Salem Chapel. The chorus against Northcote, after he had gone, "grew so loud that it moved even Tozer, who was a kind of archdeacon and leading member, too, in his way, where he sat twiddling his thumbs in his little room":— "Fm one as is qualified to give what you may call a casting vote, said Tozer, being the oldest deacon in Salem, and one as has seen generations coming and going. And as for Church and Chapel, I've served 'em both, and seen the colour of their money, and there's them as has their obligations to me, though we needn't name no names. But this I will say, as I'm cured of clever men and them as is thought superior. They ain't to be calculated upon. If any more o' them young intellectuals turns up at Carlingford, I'll tell him right out, " You ain't the man for my money." I'll say to him as bold as brass, " No been young, and now I'm old, and it's my conviction as clever young men

ain't the sort for Salem. We want them as is steady-going, and them as is consistent; good strong opinions, and none o' your charity, that's what we wants here."' Now Tozer had loved clever young mon in his

day more well than wisely, as everybody knew, and this deliverance carried all the more weight in consequence, and was echoed loudly by one general hum of content and applause."

The account of Phoebe's battle with old Copperhead is quite as good in its way, but we will leave it to the reader to discover her method of warfare, only remarking that old Copperhead is too much of a caricature. Mrs. Oliphant is like Mr. Disraeli, she hates a rich vulgarian till she will not trouble herself to analyse him, and makes him go about saying, "I hope I can afford it," like one of those characters in Charles Dickens's stories whom it pleased him to describe, as the old caricaturists used to do, by a scroll coming out of the mouth. Is there not, too, a slight want of care in the portrait of flambe, in the absence of sufficient explanation for her acceptance of Clarence Copperhead, when a man whom she loved, and whom all around her would have accepted, had already made his proposal ? Is she not too coarsely worldly, too worldly for her acute sense, in that matter? A trace of liking for young Copperhead, or of respect, or even of bedazzlement at his posi- tion, would so have redeemed the over-judicious young woman, who, neither blinded nor beguiled, but only true to her own nar- row theory of life, accepts him against her better nature, and in accepting him succeeds in all her objects, and lives and dies un- repentant and content. Girls of that stamp exist, but they would be a good deal better for a little of the contempt which Mrs. Oliphant knows so well how to pour out, but somehow spares to Phcebe Beecham.

We have said nothing, we find, except of the two principal figures, old Tozer and Phoebe, Junior, herself ; but the story is alive with people,—with Reginald May, the clergyman, who has made up his mind against his conscience to accept a sinecure, and then works himself out of the stain by sheer labour ; with his sister, Ursula, who is so good, and so pretty, and so ordinary; with their evil-tempered, debonair-mannered father, Mr. May, the forger ; and with the sisters Anne and Sophia Dorset, the first of whom, though too thinly sketched, is a most beautiful suggestion of "the elder sister born, the maiden mother, who is a clearly- defined type of humanity, though rare, perhaps, like all the finer sorts." They are all real people, and we doubt not are all remembered to this day in Carlingford, the country town the authoress has so studied that we trust, in spite of her menaces, its chronicles are not yet all closed. Mrs. Oliphant avoids, it may be wisely, the deeper springs of passion, and has never painted for us a strong nature, or an exciting career ; but she discourses so pleasantly of ordi- nary people, says so many thoughtfully pleasant things, and flavours her stories with such an appetising acidity, that as we read we forget how common-place most of her characters are, how little we are indebted to her imagination for incidents which might, for the most part, have happened in any life. Her quiet, observant writing has had a charm for us ever since we lazed away a summer day over the Athelings, now nearly a generation since ; and the charm does not, that we can perceive, change either in degree or kind, save when, as in Salem Chapel and one or two passages in Phcebe, Junior, her humour is allowed to flow in unusual depth and volume.