A CALVINIST FICTION.* Ws are always loath to say anything

against a well-meant book, especially when it is clear that there is a sincere and earnest pur- pose in it. But literature has its claims as well as good intention, and such a hash of religion, history, manners and customs as we find in this book should be kept strictly for home consumption, or only produced before very intimate friends ; even a serious-minded family would give immediate warning to a cook who sent in a dish of this kind to a mixed company, notwithstanding that she might lave been engaged in especial reference to the last clause of the advertisement, "one who goes to chapel preferred." The meat which is of foreign importation is so very high, that in the endea- vour to make it wholesome it has been sadly over-salted, and there is so small a dash of sauce-piquant that it is only enough to "keep the word of promise to our ear and break it to our hope." In plain English, some slight sketches, or rather a few details, of the French Courts of Louis XIV., and the Pretender, and of French society within those august circles, are used as improving occasions for a vast body of heavy dialogue on the tenets of Calvinistn, in which a Scotch Covenanter serving-maid, by name "The Patient-Waiting-for-Christ "—called, for short, Patient— and a young lady of nineteen, are the humble spokeswomen of our authoress ; the sauce-piquant is administered ia the shape of a vignette, suggestive of the most delicious mysteries and hair- breadth escapes ; it is a midnight scene with an Elizabethan

t 'The Sailors sought for safety by our boate, And left the ship then sinking ripe to vs. My wife, more carefull for the latter borne, Had fastned him vnto a small spare Mast, Such as sea-faring men prouide for stormes To him one of the other twins was bound, Whilst I had beene like heedful! of the other.

The children thus dispos'd, my wife and I, Fixing our eyes on whom our care was flit Fastned our selves at eyther end the mast, And floating straight, obedient to the streams,

Was carried towards Corinth, as we thought."

Arius Attlee., : Scene Prima.

Fe,'. 'There be some Sports are painful!; and their labor

Delight in them set off ; some kindes of baseness° Are nobly vndergon; and most poore matters Point to rich ends; this my meane Task° Would be as heavy to me as odious, but The Mistris which I serue, quickens what's dead, And makes my labours. pleasures: 0 she is Ten times more gentle, then her Father's crabbed; And he's compos'd of harshnesse."—Cited by Mr. Bathurst.

Asheiffe 17e. By Emily Sarah Holt. London; John F. Shaw and Co.

mansion on a rock above a wood, and in the foreground, in a narrow forest-path, is apparently a well, from which a cloaked, booted, and moustachioed cavalier is stepping, assisted by a young squire ; a woman's figure is near, and in the distance a horse is held ready saddled. This enticing picture, however, is but the bundle of carrots tied to the stick and held before the donkey's nose by the rider, not to be administered, except as a reward when the journey is over ; indeed, of the two hundred and twenty con- secutive pages, only two have anything whatever to do with Ashcliffe Hall, and we cannot at all feel with the donkey that the carrots are sufficient reward for our trouble ; they are only a mouthful after all, a few pages, during the reading of which one is stirred with the old delightful sensation of anxiety for the safety of the poor gentleman in the well.

The book is a sort of compilation from histories and the Bible, and apparently from works like "Notes and Queries," where curious facts are collected ; the sources of information are generally conscientiously given in abundant foot-notes of most amusing minuteness ; we are told, for instance, in one of them that "the peculiar drawing up of the chin towards the throat, known as bridling, was a very essential point of fine breeding at the date of this story " ; another says, "for the meaning of these technical phrases in 'the exercise of the fan,' see the Spectator, of June 27, 1711 ;" another devotes half a page to the various read- ings of the nursery rhyme :— "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Bless the bed that I lie on

and another half page gives us the various authorities for assuring as that James II.'s widow was "tall and admirably shaped," had a "face the most graceful oval," a "complexion of the last degree of fairness,—" a different authority thinks her" complexion clear, but somewhat pale,"—" lips pouting," "teeth lovely," &c. ; and in the same way we have extracts innumerable, in these foot-notes, from the Dod's peerages of Queen Anne and Louis XIV., if there were such things ; and the number of references to Scripture,—for we are always pinned by one when a quotation is made,—in the most solemn part of the book, amounts to a hundred and fifteen in a hundred and forty-seven consecutive pages ; once there are eight in a single page, and five often.

We cannot here enter into a conflict with Calvinism, but we may say that this book, in which bigotry abounds, if not cant, is not behind others of its kind in the magnificent self-com- placency of its self-elected Elect and in its 'melancholy satisfac- tion,' as we have heard it called, in the just fate of the unre- generate children of wrath ; nor in the—to us—horrible familiarity, yet vague meaning of its religious expression ; as for instance, when one of the elect admits that she is always doing wrong, adding, "But then, you see, I just go to the Blood ;" and we cannot pass over the constant personal application—made, no doubt, in ignorance both by this writer and others of her class— exceedingly misleading and even dangerous, of isolated passages of Scripture, which have an altogether different meaning if taken properly with the context, and which are totally inapplicable, even when unmutilated, in the circumstances in which and to the people in whose service they are enlisted.

There is no story to speak of. The daughter of a Jacobite baronet learns at nineteen years of age that she is not a child of the Whig family in which she has been brought up. She is claimed by her step-mother and taken to Paris, and is introduced to a half-brother of seventeen, at whose death in battle—which does not happen till he has been converted by the aforesaid agents of our authoress, and dies with a Bible in his bosom, on the fly-leaf of which texts appropriate to death and satisfactory to his mourn- ing and anxious instructors are found written in pencil—she returns to her English home, leaving her step-mother in a convent. This is all ; and the interest must be supposed to lie either in the anecdotes of the miraculous escapes and special grace of the Scotch Covenanters, related by Patient; or in the descriptions, exceedingly formal and guide-book like, of the licentious French Court ; or in the religious dialogues in which the heroine is wonderfully soon an adept, quoting, in a few months, as easily from Exodus, Leviticus, Zephaniah, &c., as from the Gospels and Epistles. On the return of this young lady and Patient to Ashcliffe Hall, they have an ally in another old female servant,—Cicely ; she stands at a humble distance from the learning and sternness of the grave, grim, gaunt Covenanter—sogrim that she won't call her mistress's dog "Venus," because that is heathenish, but shouts for it, " Dog ! dog !"— indeed, Cicely only bears to Patient about the same relation that the parish clerk bears to the parson ; but the child-like element in this good .woman's mind and conversation is not much more to the credit of our author's power of observing and reproducing human

nature than her other creations ; it is overdone, and the outpour- ings of her simple soul are mere village twaddle about religion.

The execution of the work is not much happier than the matter.

The adoption of the old English phraseology covereth, like charity, a multitude of sins ; it sounds quaint and attractive ; and the choosing of a distant date serves a somewhat similar purpose in distancing the objections of readers who are not up in history; but it is difficult for any but a very imaginative mind to reproduce, with much vividness and reality, the language and manners of a long- past day, so as to make the characters live in it for the reader ; and the scenes we have here do not look like any in which the personages actually existed, but like descriptions copied from formal accounts of the habits and customs and lan- guage of ancient times ; these, too, are sometimes forgotten and sometimes exaggerated ; we have, for instance, the heroine's half-brother, a young French officer, talking modern English slang one hundred and sixty years ago. We scarcely think he would, at that time, have used the expressions "cool proceeding," "thaw it mild," &c., to say nothing of the difficulty presented by his having only learnt English in France ; possibly our author holds that fashions in language recur as they do in dress. Even

then the same materials would scarcely crop up again with the fashion. This brother talks and argues in a way utterly unnatural to a volatile French boy of seventeen ; he details all the careful observations he has made in society on the inconsistency between profession and action, and sums up his experience thus,—" What wonder, then, that the fire of my faith—the old, bright, happy trust of my childhood—has blackened and gone out ?" and at another time he goes deeply into the question of the sincerity of

believers who don't work at the conversion of others. Again, the adulation of Louis XIV.'s valet is made so unbounded that he speaks of the king as condescending to enjoy good health, and of his dogs as "indescribably happy" when the king deigns to feed them with his own hand. The ladies, too, are so ultra-modish that one of them says seriously to her daughter, "By the way, you ought not to have been ill in crossing the Channel,—so very undignified ;" and when the same lady's only son is going into battle, her chief anxiety is the sit of his cravat, and her parting words are about it.

It is dangerous to question the facts of so careful a compiler, but we may be allowed to suppose that she has drawn on her own fancy occasionally and in a very childish fashion in the creation of such meagre story as there is, making, for instance, a Jesuit priest, a Jacobite, represent himself as an artist sent from London by Sir Godfrey Kneller to sketch gentlemen's seats in Devonshire, and thus gain access to the houses of the Whig gentry. The same Jesuit is represented, the day after he has dined in the charac- ter of artist with the owner of Ashcliffe, as offering himself at the same house as footman, and remaining there a month, un- detected by the numerous pairs of female eyes which he had to encounter ; and he and a confederate are employed for several months in hanging about this place, only, as far as we can dis- cover, to throw an air of mystery over the story,—and osteusibly only to prove what they already knew and what was not denied. Indeed unmeaning and unnatural incidents abound.

Here and there, however, we have a bit of writing that is natural without losing the quaintness of language affected through- out, as in the description of the death, in a duel, of the step- mother's first husband ; and here is an illustration of God's pur- poses in chastisement, which is pretty, and apparently original, as otherwise the authority would certainly have been given :—

"'And one day—ah! that day !—when Roswith was very ill, I asked of him the thing which did exercise me. And he said unto me, gently and kindly, holding mine hand in his quavering hand, for he was a very ancient gentleman,—"Dear child" quoth he, "clod thou know so little thy Father? Thou mindest me of my little son,' saith he, "when the fire brake out in mine house. When I basted up into his chamber, which was above the chamber afire, and tare the blankets from his bed, and haled him thence somewhat roughly, the bairn greet, and asked of me what made me so angry." Well, I could not choose but smile to think of the babe's blunder; and he saith, "I see thou canst understand that. Why, dear child," quoth he, "thou art about just the same blunder as my bairn. Thy Father sendeth a messenger in haste to fetch thy soul home to him ; and lo! Father,' sayest thou, 'why art thou so angry ?' We are all little children," quoth he, "and are apt to think our Father is angry when he is but short with us because of danger. And dost thou think, lassie," he said, "that they which saw the face of God first thing after that storm, rebuked him because he had fetched them thither by water ? " So then I saw mine error.'"