SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

FICTION,

Hawkstone ; a Tale of and for England in DA—. In two volumes Murray.

TRAVELS,

Travels in India ; including Sande and the Punjab. By Captain Leopold Von °etch. Translated from the German, by H. Evans Lloyd, Esq. In two volumes.

Longman and Co.

APPLIED CHEMISTRY,

Rural Economy, in its Relations with Chemistry, Physics, and Meteorology ; or an Application of the Principles of Chemistry and Physiology to the Details of Practical Fanning. By J. B. Boussingault, Member of the Institute of France, &c. Ste. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by George Law, Agriculturist. Badlit,re.

HAWKSTONE

Is another emanation from the Young England school of reformers. The subject of the book is the social, political, and religious condition of England: the object of the author is to bring about a millennium : and part of the conclusion is devoted to showing how it can be done, by a landed gentleman who sets his face against Whig and Conservative politicians ; establishes a Protestant monastery upon his estate ; opens a deserted manufactory to employ the poor at fair wages without any thought of profit, though Providence somehow gives him a percentage (Vol. H. page 356) ; binds over all with whom he had any influence to deal in "their own immediate neighbourhood" ; encourages domestic manufactures—e. g. the old-fashioned spinning-wheel ; procures no arti- cles of luxury or finery from a distance, but "introduces" the country shopkeepers "to the first wholesale houses in London," and pays them a fair profit, "casting to the winds the miserable maxim of the economists that the first law of prudence is to buy cheap and to sell dear " ; and fatally, expels the Popish priest and Nonconformist teachers from the good town of Hawkstone, their respective flocks having all been won over to the Established Church.

The story that serves to develop these and many other notions is rather episodical and discursive ; but it may be reduced to three leading phases. First, we have an elaborate series of sketches of the Hawkstone people and their doings; in which the characters and conduct of an agricultural town, invaded by factories, enlightened by Liberalism, and stocked with well- aupported beneficial societies "without distinction of sect," are described with great felicity, some malice, but a tolerant good-nature, except where Romania]. n or Dissenting ministers come on the carpet. The second branch of the tale involves the career and character of Villiers, the Pro- testant hero of the story; as a fellow of the name of Pearce, who is in- tended to exhibit the author's idea of Papistry and Papists, forms the third phase. So much depends upon these two persons, that, beyond the mere sketches of provincial Hawkstone, and the innumerable didactic discussions scattered through the work, an idea of their character and conduct will convey a sufficient impression of Han'/stone, a Tale of and for England in 184—. Ernest Villiers, the hero of the book, and beau ideal of the author's conception of a Christian gentleman, is a sort of sober and serious Mr. Pelham. His mother was a Romanist; his father a Protestant, or rather a profligate of no particular creed ; and a curse hung over the estate and its possessors, ever since the first lay owner, a courtier of bluff Harry, seized it from the Anglican Church. As a boy, his father chose to bring Villiers up a Protestant ; but not feeling competent to in- doctrinate him with religious principles, banded him over to a tutor, and then to Eton and Oxford. The cherished memory of his mother saved him from the usual irregularities of youth ; and, after running pretty much through the whole circle of human knowledge, and finding all void and vain, he stumbled upon the idea of the " Church "— " A power divine, though upon earth, bearing in its hands the keys of Truth, opening and closing at will the fountain-springs of good and evil, swaying the hearts of men, and overruling the oscillations of their reason; and capable of bind- ing into one the straggling elements of society, till all affections should be ab- sorbed in one object, and every movement subdued to one law. It was a grand conception for a grand mind."

However, before he could ascertain which among the various claimants was the right church, lie was sent for by his valetudinarian father in Italy.

The Church of Rome ramifies everywhere in these pages, to keep up and pick up information. A dead set is made at Villiers when he reaches the Eternal City, in the hopes that casuistical art, with the impression of his mother and her early lessons, may induce his conversion to the Papal communion. But the Oxford-man is not to be caught with chaff. He holds discourses, he listens to arguments, he reads a summary put into his hands ; but he proceeds to verify the quotations from the Fathers, finds them false, and is for ever lost to Popery. Villiers and his father are subsequently found at Naples ; where the hero falls in love, and pri- vately marries the daughter of a- Spanish exile. But he has offended Mr. Pearce—ostensibly valet to General Villiers, in reality a Popish agent, and villain of the piece—by crossing him in love, and knocking him down. This worthy accordingly determines on vengeance : so he gets the superannuated General Villiers converted to Romauism, persuades him to disinherit Ernest, poisons young Mrs. Villiers, and steals the child ; leaving no hope in life to the bereaved husband and father, save a cons- - i nussion n a marching regiment, with which he goes to Canada, to read the army moral lessons on duelling, and astonish the natives by his virtues. In due tune, however, matters mend : an uncle dies and leaves him a fortune; the Hawkstone estate is found to be entailed, so the General's will only goes for an intention ; and Ernest Villiers returns to talk very long dialogues upon topics of the day, to work all the wonders we have already intimated, and to be perpetually pursued by Pearce, the agent of Popery.

This man, as we have said, is the villain of the piece : and if the reader call to mind all he may have read of monks in the romances of the Radcliffe school, or all he may have seen accomplished by gentlemen who take the serious line of business at minor theatres, he Nvill still fall short of Mr. Pewee. Onr his birth, pitrentage, and education, there hangs a mystery ; but we guess that he was an Irish Papiat, who had to leave the place of his nativity for no particular good. By the time the scene opens at Hawkstone, he is matured—all-seeing, all-knowing, all-hearing, ubiqui- tous—here, there, and everywhere. He plots against the Government, and plans an insurrection among the miners of a district corrupted (of course) by a greedy economist. He forces a Conservative banker and candidate for the representation of Hawkstone to poison himself by prussic acid ; which effectually removes him from the coming election. His crew carry off the parson of the parish ; who is confined in the mines, and made to take a fearful oath, sanctified by drinking a goblet of blood ; these mines and miners answering the purpose of the castles and banditti of Italian romance. With the view of destroying Villiers, Pearce organizes an attack by miners upon a public-house where that gentleman has put up with some friends : and he does a great many other things, though mostly upon the principle of facit per alium, since, like all true diplo- matists, he never appears in anything that may contpromise him. His disguises beat those in Monk Lewis's Bravo of Venice. Sometimes he is a butcher, sometimes a beggar, sometimes an old woman; and the thrilling effect of his look and tones surpasses anything ever seen or heard in melodramas. Even though overcome at last, he still triumphs. As we have seen already, he stole the son of Villiers ; and he brings him up as a low and profligate reprobate. Engaged in an insurrection, Master Villiers is cut down by his papa, heading the Hawkstone Yeomanry ; and found guilty on the paternal evidence; when Mr. Pearce, also in custody, condescends to intimate that lie will inform Villiers of his son's where- abouts for five thousands pounds, and the following formalities.

"We will not pass again into that dark chamber with Beattie and with Villiers. What Pearce had demanded, what he had thirsted for, laboured for during years— what he bad purchased at the expense of his soul, he enjoyed. Providence granted him his heart's desire—not figuratively, but really. Villiers knelt down at his feet--not figuratively, but really. The wretch who had been his menial set his foot upon his master's neck, and almost spurned him: and Villiers bore it all. He remembered the curse of undutifulness, [he had been impatient of his father's frailties,] to be made a servant of servants. He only looked up imploringly, for his heart was nearly broken with a frightful apprehension of he knew not what. He made the promise; he signed the bond. And when Pearce had snatched it furiously from him, he waited as one powerless, crushed, all but annihilated, to hear the announcement so longed for, yet now so dreaded.

"Pearce looked once more at his watch, and at that moment it struck six. It is twenty miles,' he said, coolly, 'is it not, to Broughton? It will take you at least two hours to get there, half-an-hour to start. Take it ' he exclaimed, and he threw a packet of paper, tied and sealed with black, into Villiers's hands. 'Go to the prison at Broughton; you will find your son—on the scaffold.' "They were the last words Pearce uttered in that eel]. Villiers had no sooner staggered from the room than he disappeared, with a triumphant laugh, within the secret passage, where his accomplice had been waiting for him to escape."

This might tell on a suburban stage ; but the fate of Mr. Pearce would be still more striking could it be managed. 14e loses his way in the old Popish secret under-ground passages communicating with his cell, and is destroyed by rats.

To criticize the romantic parts of Hawk,stone, would, be a waste of time. Perhaps the best romances give a very false idea of Italian life and character during the middle ages ; but the very worst refleet the re- ceived notions of their readers upon the subject, and the whole is certainly far enough removed from anything like existing manners. The author of Hawkstone is obviously a scholar and a thinker; yet he imitates the wildest wonders of the circulating-library school of romance, and renders them still more extravagant by connecting them with the present state of society. Great power of style and vividness of representation may, however, render these parts not the least popular portion of the book, should the hook come into the hands of popular readers ; and the miners' attack and repulse upon the inn is depicted with great force, and well sustained. The more level parts of the tale are not very interesting, be- cause we do not feel much interest in the characters, who are too secure in their virtues. In a literary sense, the sketches in the town of Hawkstone are the choicest things, though occasionally elabo- rated to something like heaviness. But the interest of the book is in its disquisitions—the dialogues, letters, and intermingled reflections, with which the work abounds. In a political point of' view, it may per- haps be considered as a fair representation of Young England ; more lofty, more earnest, and of a far higher morality than Coningsby, and not a jot more foolish in its schemes for restoring the golden age. The religious portion of the work is a greater problem. The author is not a Tracta- rian ; and so far from having any leanings to Romanism, liatvlistone is really an unscrupulous and standing libel upon the Romanists. He is not a High Churchman in any usual sense of the term ; and he assails Evangelicals both in his lay and clerical persons. The different sectarians are rather maligned or ridiculed than assailed ; though he wanders out of Ins way to intimate that many Teetotallers are pickpockets. In short., the author of Hanilistone is his own Infallibility. In doctrine he seems to stand by the Anglican communion, in his views of the Apostolical succes- sion he belongs to those who hold it in the strictest mode ; the proudest Tractarian, the most imperious Romanist, cannot entertain loftier ideas than he does of the power of the Church and the priestly character ; whilst he would engraft many of the practices of the Roman and Oriental churches upon the Anglican Tractarian doctrine and opinions— such as monasteries, mortification of the flesh, fasting, and so forth. The utility or necessity of a retreat for the desolate, the aged, or the stricken, is often incidentally urged in Hangestone, before the hero of the tale establishes his receptacles, towards the end.

One of these examples will afford a specimen of the author's argu- ments and of his lighter style. An old lady, Mrs. Crump, has been watching some mysterious movements at her opposite neighbour's, winch turn out to be a preparation for a meeting of the Dorcas Society.

AN OLD FRIHND TO THE CHURCH.

The" pith" implied much. It implied, first, that Mrs. Cramp_ was.not a.mean- ber of the Dorcas or Benevolent Lying-in Union Society; secondly, that she was no friend to it • thinil that she was, as she delighted to say, one of the old schooL -ffitedidnat.think gcokever =whom such wade& Shecriduothkennz- ing with Dissenters—the Miss Mitedougalls were Presbyterians, and the Maddoxes linitarian.s; she liked the good old way, and kept to the Church, as her father and mother had done before her; and, if dozing regularly every morning over the Psalms and Lessons, attending regularly in her pew at church every Sunday, and even on Wednesdays and Fridays and Saints' days, and giving her annual mite to the National Schools, and, we may add, playing her nightly rubber with Dr. Grant, the old paralytic Rector, constituted a friend to the Church, no one could be relied on for more determined support than Mrs. Crump. And yet on the " pish" there followed something like a sigh; and as the old lady sat watching for the first ar- rival, she fell into a soliloquy on the evils of a solitary old age, when there were no children to repay the care of their youth, and society treated her as a burden, and weak health and advancing infirmities prevented her from engaging in any active occupation either of business or anmsement. There was, indeed, to relieve the heavy days which dragged on without change and without hope, an occasional morning call, (few they were and far between,) from Miss. Mabel Brook and the other dowagers of the town. And at times, one or two of the younger ladies

. charitably reminded each other that they ought to call on poor Mrs. Crump. And once or twice in the month, Martha, who knew how her mistress required some - relief to her monotonous existence, would entrap a stray nursery-maid, with Mrs. :Thompson's little ,sirls or Mrs. Jones's baby; and, as the old lady crawled to her . cupboard for the slice of sweet cake, or made them sit down at her feet to show them the Wonders of her worsted work, a tear would stand in her eyes at the thought of what had been denied to herself,—a child, a grandchild, any being -whom she might look to for support, and love and watch over, and think on as a second self, instead of hanging upon a cold neglectful world, without interest and without affection, until the grave closed over her head. And another thought . sometimes struck her, little as her mind was formed to deeper reflection, that God could not have intended such things to be; that if he were, as she devoutly be- lieved, a God of love, and Christianity were designed by him to be a blessing to

• all mankind, there might be somewhere in its system, when rightly brought out, - -a provision fur destitution like hers; and that something might be deficient in a Church which left her, the widow, the labouring with sickness, the desolate, the all but oppressed—whom it prayed for as one of its especial objects of care—with no consolation but a Bible, as little understood as it was monotonously perused, and no fixed task of duty but her worsted-work and the feeding of her eat; no one bound to attend on her but the hired Martha; and, saving one day in seven, no aid or comfort to her devotion, but once or twice a hurried service in a cold and desolate church, with no one, perhaps, but the children in the Grey-school gal- buy, and poor Betty Foyle the blind old woman from the almshouse, to join in offering praises and thanksgiving for a population of thousands.

THE DORCAS LTING-IN SOCIETY.

They were, in fact, fair, ordinary specimens of the middle class of English people- neither very clever nor very stupid, very vulgar nor very polished, very enlargjd in their notions nor very narrow. In one point they resembled all Eng- lish people alike: they acknowledged an implicit submission for the little world in which they moved; anxiously aspiring to the notice of its leaders, and conde- scendingly patronizing all who came beneath themselves: and measuring the whole fate and character of the vast terra incognita beyond them, by the opinions, acts, _ and vicissitudes of their own little coterie. Perhaps, indeed, the Dorcas Society 7.COUld not pretend to include exactly the lite of Hawkstone; for there were seve- - sal little suburban villas in the neighbourhood, which, being uncontaminated by pavement and gas-lamps, aspired to a claim to rurality, and held somewhat aloof . 'from thedmidedly town population. But still it was composed of " respectables," in that sense of the word which perhaps might be properly.rendered."without a 814." ' Besides the Miss Morgans, the surgeon's daughters, there was Mrs. Lomax the binker's wife, who officiated as president; the Miss Macdougalls, who tenanted the large brick house with five windows in front, and a coach-house and garden at the North entrance of the town; Mrs. and Miss James, who had recently retired from the superintendence of a very respectable seminary for young ladies; Mrs. . Hancock- the wife of Captain Hancock, an officer on half-pay, who continued to vegetate in a neat little verandahed cottage in the outskirts of the town; and the Maddokes, whom their father's success in trade had placed in easy circumstances, and left them abundance both of time and money to devote to the charities of flawkstene. And one after another they arrived at Miss Mabel's door; and though Mrs. Crnum, who was by no means a favourable critic, did detect about them all a little bustle of serious importance more than the occasion required—and Miss James had put into her cap rather a gayer display of flowers than suited the sobriety of her age—and the Miss blacdoug,alls looked somewhat prim—and Mrs. Lomax was guilty of a little ostentation in making her footboy follow her with a work-basket and cloak—still there was little to censure in their appearance, and nothing to ridicule. And any one who could have seen the hearty welcome with which Miss Mabel received them, and the kind mutual greetings of the party, and the cheerfulness With which they produced work-boxes and baskets, scissors and needles, and ringed them OD the green cloth of Miss blithers largest table, would think it a very ill-placed satire which attempted to caricature such a charitable meeting, assembled, as modern philanthropy delights to express it, without dis- tinction-of sect or party, to promote the comfort and relieve the wants of their fellow-creatures.

It will be seen from these few passages, that the author of Ilawkstone is a keen observer and vivid describer of such life as has passed before him, with a touch of causticity in his temperament, that is subdued by good-nature, unless he has to handle the actors iu religious or political party. In the disquisitional passages of his book Ile always exhibits keen- - ness of thought, and often profundity ; but his deductions are mostly vitiated by foregone conclusions of his own. A close, finished, and powerful composition attends him throughout, and to a considerable degree sustains the absurdity even of his romance.