Lady Bell : a Story of Last century. By the
Author of " Citoyenne Jacqueline." (Strahan and Co.)—The author of "Citoyenne Jacque- , line " has not succeeded so well in this, her second attempt at repro- ducing the manners and the talk of a bygone age, as in her first. She .did well to select the herrt-stirring scenes of the Great French Revolu- tion, for therein she found strong emotions and situations which must always be interesting, and can never have the entirely passed-away effect of mere incidents of domestic life which are supposed to have
taken place in England a hundred years ago. The period in which the scene of the first story is laid was one of the most romantic in the history of the world ; the period of the second had nothing romantic -about it in England ; and the author of Lady Bell has not invested it by the power of imagination with the missing attribute. The people in -the story, including Lady Bell, who is married twice in her teens, are stiff and unreal, and the attempts at local colouring, and the phraseology of the period,—the use of the words "Madam," "sure," ‘• purely," and others,—only render the effect strange to this age, with- out carrying the reader back to another. Details of costume, travel- ling, elections, and military affairs are carefully managed ; but they are too plainly mechanical, and the whole composition is unsatisfactorily thin. The best touch in it is the runaway Lady Bell's meeting with Mrs. Siddons and her husband, and her service of that lady in the capacity of "gentlewoman" during one of her provincial tours. The parsimony and matter-of-fact of the great actress are brought out with some humour ; a quality of which there is no further instance in the book. Miss Kingscote, to whom Lady Bell is transferred, is prepos- terous and dull. We admire the painstaking industry with which the author has made up her composition, but we cannot regard it as worth the trouble, or see that the mistakes and miseries of Lady Bell are any more interesting or probable because they are pushed back into the last century.
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