FOUR NOVELS.*

" IF we consider the almost incalculable importance of fiction as a means of moulding the heart and inclining the affections towards what is good and loveable—wherein we suspect it possesses more influence than even the school or the pulpit—it becomes a ques- tion how far the t easy reading,' with the love of excitement demanded peremptorily by a peculiar age—civilized it may be, yet with tendencies in m my ways towards a relaxation of the old vigour —might not be reconciled with more literature, higher aspirations after the beautiful in nature and character, and a better developed morality." We have quoted this portentous sentence from the preface to the first novel on our list, and we propose to try the ten volumes before us by this standard.

In gratitude to Mr. Leighton for thus providing us with a stan- dard, we must of course give him the place of honour. But that is the only honour to which he is entitled. Anything more inane than his attempt at easy reading reconciled with literature, mo- rality, and aspirations after the beautiful, it would be hard to

v Shelborn. By At:mauler Leighton. 1 vol. London: Smith and Elder. tass. Who is the Heir/ By Mortimer Colima. 3 vole. London: Maxwell and Co. 1855. Cemal Muting+. By Captain W. W. Knotty's. 3 vols. Londm: Hurst and Blaokett.

The Naval Lieutftsant. By C. F. Armstrong. 3 vols. London: Newby.

conceive. If a young lady who is perfectly good and lovely chooses to be born of a humpbacked father, who for some reason or other

takes it into his head to pronounce her illegitimate, and to be saddled with a malevolent stepmother, who means ill and does it, a good old grandmother, who means well and does not do it, and a foolish lover, who means nothing at all, we cannot wonder at all sorts of misfortunes alighting on her head. What we do wonder at is the common-place manner in which the misfortunes come, and in which the heroine receives them. She lets herself be branded with ille- gitimacy, and never demands either proof or explanation ; lets her lover (in the playful way which is so natural to him and so un- natural to us) call her a bastard, lets her father and stepmother arrange a marriage for her with the village doctor, accuse her of stealing the grandmother's diamonds, and of poisoning her half-brother. But her nonchalance is exceeded by that of the author. After taking the trouble to devise such quaint mon- strosities as some of his characters, he makes no further use of 'them. He gives them unlimited powers, and does not care what they do with them. His hunchback, who would give his soul for revenge, and does not scruple to make away with the entry of his sewn marriage in the register, contents himself with bluster about 4'hell's legions, led by their prince," rising up and saying him nay, or opposing him " by their fires of brimstone spewed out of the mouth of demons." Of all denouements that of Shellburn is the most absurd eve ever read. The heroine has received a present of some magnifi- cent diamonds from her grandmother, but on her death-bed the old lady wanders, and says some one must have stolen her parure. These diamonds were kept in an ivory box, which has been seen in the possession of the heroine; she is brought before a judge for the theft, and her lover, in whose hands the box has been placed, pro- duces it at her request. The judge opens it ; a statement is found inside that the grandmother had given the diamonds to the heroine, and another paper, which proves to be the marriage-cer- tificate of the hunchback father and his first wife. All the characters of the story turn round, and run out of court; the heroine and her lover are married in one page, and have nine children in the next; the hunchback dies off as fast as he can, and the wicked stepmother seems to be punished by living. And now we shall be obliged to Mr. Leighton if he will show us the connection between his novel and his preface.

Who is the Heir? is very easy reading, and is " reconciled " with much literature, but it will not mould the heart, and it lays little claim to morality. Viewed simply as a novel it is a failure, but it is not a failure in the sense of Shellburn, and the talent it shows is encouraging. Mr. Mortimer Collins writes with great ability, and though it would not be safe to predict that he might write a good novel, it is certain that anything else he wrote might be good. If be had steadily turned away his eyes from certain models, and resolved to write from himself and to himself, this book would have been much better. But he has been led astray by the suc- cesses of others, or by his own appreciation of others. On the one hand, it has seemed impossible for any novel to take without sensational mystery, and ia making his sons and daughters pass through the fire to this modern Moloch Mr. Collins has scorched them so that they are hardly presentable. On the other hand, he has been attracted by the light touch with which so' many novelists put the great men of the day on their canvas, and enliven their groups with a little contemporary scandal. Many of the faults of Who is the Heir ? are attributable to these two causes, but even if these two causes had not operated, we are not sure that Mr. Collins would have succeeded. The present run on novels is like the run on plays in the time of Dryden. Novels are a necessity of the age, says Mr. Caxton ; they seem indeed a 'necessity to every author. Now it is not every one who has the talent for telling stories, and a man of real power may injure himself by writing bad novels when he ought to be writing good books of a different order. We do not say that this is the ease with Mr. Collins, because it is difficult to judge from a first attempt. Still, if he has it in him, we hope that next time he will bring it out. His present novel bears reading very well. You may take it up again and again and be struck by a good descrip- tion, a keen epigram, or a stray stanza of well-turned and melo- dious verse. But for our conviction that so much of the apparent sincerity of the book is affectation, we should recommend it highly to readers of a dilettantish tone of mind. Epigrams such as, " But you ought to have gout, oughtn't' you, to show good blood ? " addressed to an earl by his daughter, abound in Mr. Collins's volumes ; and though epigrams do not make up a novel, any more than plums make up a pudding, there are.some undisci- plined minds, like the boy home for his holidays, who range the

plums round their plates as a bonne bouche after the hard work of the flour and suet.

Captain Knollys has more dash and rattle than Mr. Collins, and introduces an even more objectionable amount of personality. A story that went the round of all England a year and a half ago is almost too fresh to give a spice to a novel after so short an interval. But this is the only link between the two authors. Captain Knollys gives us " the excitement demanded peremptorily by a peculiar age," and he administers it in the form of military adventures. The hero of them is a hero indeed. The dangers he encounters, the feats he achieves, show no relaxation of the old vigour. Whether he is saving a lovely girl from a mad dog, or an infant from the sharks and yeasty waves of the Atlantic, or an old gentleman from two garotters in Bond Street; whether he is fighting with the Kaffirs or the father of his love, with an old Turk or the Russians at Balaclava, he is equally perfect and self- possessed. The new lightthrown by Captain Knollys on the Crimean War cannot fail to be valuable to Mr. Kinglake, if Mr. K inglake is not too much attached to his own ideas to make any changes in his next edition. At all events Oswald Hastings must be his great authority when he comes to the description of the charge of Balaclava. Even the Laureate's poem will have to be altered, for Captain Knollys adds one more—Oswald Hastings himself—to the six hundred. That charge has already been described in fiction by Mr. Henry Kingsley in Ravenshoe, Mr. Lawrence in Sword and Gown, and we believe Major Whyte Melville in The Interpreter. But Captain Knollys has distanced them all. By his account Lord Raglan saw the mistake as soon as it was committed, and sent Oswald Hastings after the Light Brigade to stop them. Oswald did not catch them up in time to reverse the general verdict of history—which is almost a pity—but he joined them in the midst of the gnus, formed some of the men, and headed them in a charge on,the Russian dragoons.

After such prodigies of valour we turn almost with indifference to the hero of the sister service, Mr. Armstrong's Naval Lieutenant. And yet the feats of this young gentleman are scarcely inferior to those of Oswald Hastings. Both these men are the favourites of fortune. Both escape wounds as a general rule, or suffer very slightly when it comes to their turn to be wounded. The Naval Lieutenant captures a French privateer, which is the terror of the whole commerce of England, with a lugger and three men. With the privateer he captures a Spanish brig, and with his schooner and brig he captures a French corvette. He is proceeding to take the next step, and capture a frigate with the corvette (which as a French ship " did not strike our hero as a very fast sailer," but on becoming a prize and an English man-of-war is " evidently a vessel of great speed "), when the novelist, ee.supretne disposer of events in his fictitious world, cries halt. It was high time that he should. His hero would otherwise have been left, like Alexander the Great, lamenting twat no more worlds remained for him to conquer.

As we lay these volumes aside, and look back for a general survey, we see that the most merciful criticism would not accept them as

coming up to Mr. Leighton's standard. Probably the three last authors would.not lay any claim to it for themselves. They would consider that if their books got readers at the circulating library, and if the credit side of the account brought a smile to the face of the publisher, their work was done. To some extent their work is done. We have read in the exercise of our duty far worse novels than

the three last, and even novels worse than Shellburn in this at least, that they were not confined to one volume. We have no right to

remonstrate with Mr–Collins if he is contented with the facile success of a clever writer, with lightness that is often ease, and happy turns that are almost grace and elegance. Captain Knollys has a full right to " fight his battles o'er again," almost to take the

Redan and to change the fate of Europe. Mr. Armstrong is wel- come to a monopoly of naval achievements, from cutting out a

privateer to the still more enviable feat of driving a First Lord of the Admiralty into a fit of apoplexy. Only when an author professes such high aims as are put forth in Mr. Leighton's preface,

and comes so miserably short in his performance, we do not know that anything need restrain us from speaking our mind, or making his arrogant claims the peg for our general reflections.