.711 - adga Dunraven. By the Author of "The Queen of Connaught."
(Bentley.)—In this very Irish novel, Mr. Dunraven, his son Conn, and his niece Madge, are brought over from their native Ballymey and their ancestral castle of Shrauamonragh to the English village of Armstead, of which their kinsman and bringer-over, the Rev. Mr. Aldyn, is rector. The high jinks played by this little Irish colony in their strange English surroundings supply the action of the story. Snch plot as there is consists in COMI'S trial for murder and his deliverance by confession on the part of the real criminal, who has been worked upon by Madge; and the best "point " in the book is the contrasted possession of a secret by Madge, on the one haucl—who has sheltered the real murderer, and been sworn to silence by him—and by Rosamond Leigh on the other, who knows that Conn, at the time " when the gun had been fired which had shot down Lord Rigby," was " holding her (Rem- mond) in hie arms, and kissing her tremulous lips." Madge and Rosamond Leigh, the impulsive Irish girl and the cold English one, are contraeted ; and, agails, the Irish Conn and the English rector's son, George Aldyn. But tho contrasts are somewhat stngey, and the absence of reality in the drawing of the various characters is not made up for by a painful realism that is somewhat suggestive of careful scene-setting and elaborate stage-direc- tion. Nor is this realism always very exact. Madge, for instance, after sitting with bare legs and feet " in the middle of a grassy dell, which was set close upon the margin of an extensive wood," where "the grass 'was very thick and very tall— but now and then the soft westerly wind swept the tall blades apart, revealing, as it did so, glimpses of deep purple wood violets, tufts of pale primroses, and delicate patches of green and golden woodland moss "—climbs " up to the top of a grassy bank which shut in the highway," and " looks around." In the interval of her climbing, the spring has given way to lath summer : " all seemed one luminous vision of yellow cornfields, dark, waving .woods, green meadows, rich with after-math,—gardens laden with fruit." And if we cannot praise the painting of nature, what is to be said of the description of passion P Of this, there is plenty in the book; but it is passion of the torn kind, which becomes wearisome, even if it has over begun to be moving, and utterly unrelieved or supple- mented by the slightest conception of the humorous or the grotesque. People's eyes, on the shortest notice, " burn like balls of fire)" the English judge, on Matthew Dalton's confession in court, orders him into custody, "in a voice trembling with passion ;" an irritated gamekeeper laughs " with the ferocity of a mastiff on the chain )" mid Conn, in a farewell interview with Rosamned Leigh, "with his right arm held her firmly against his breast, with his loft hand raised her face ; then, in a hot frenzy of passion, he .covered her face; her cheeks, her lips, with kisses," with the sublimely bathetic result that "her face was scarlet ; she rubbed her:scented handkerchief across her lips, and stared at him." The writer has done much better than this before, and will, we hope, do better egain.
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