Sorrow on the Sea. 3 vols. By Lady ;Wood. (Tinsley).—Lady
Wood's last novel, Sabina, was a tale of very considerable power. It contained at least one character, that of the old seaman, Lieutenant Rock, which will not easily be forgotten by any who made acquaintance with it; and the portraiture of the heroine, if less correct in drawing, was cer- tainly brilliant in colour. Sorrow on the Sea is so inferior in every respect that wo can with difficulty believe it to be the work of the same writer. At the very beginning, indeed, of the first volume the characters are drawn with some little care, and where Lady Wood chooses to exer- cise care she often shows skill. The group of the widow Noble with her two daughters, the invalid and the beauty, and her hus- band's bachelor friend, whom the widow cordially dislikes, but cannot help trusting, is at least pleasant and natural. And we augured good things from a happy touch which met us at p. 7, where the dead husband's watch, which had stopped when he was struck with the musket-ball, goes on again is the daughter's hand. " From the idea it gave of recent life in its possessor, the girls listened to it awestricken." But, alas ! the beauty goes away to be a companion to a rich lady, and we fall, so to speak, into the hands of the most intolerable villain that we have ever come across. He is as beautiful as Apollo, but he lies, intercepts, and forges letters, does his beat to murder his father, slanders the beauty most infamously, in short, is a scoundrel of a kind which we now seldom meet with even in fiction. The beauty, however, is safely married early in the second volume, and we have thenceforward various episodes—of a sort of baby-murdering establishment in Essex, of a cruise and shipwreck, and of an island in the Pacific, and of its fair inhabitant " clad from the head to the foot in a thin dress of bright blue cloth," and• carrying a dagger and a bow and arrows, who, landing from her canoe, turns her face to heaven, and in a slightly Scotch accent murmurs, " Our- Father, I thank Thee for Thy protection and my safety!" No wonder that Edmond, the hero, "rubbed his eyes." There are scenes and persona with which we do not profess to be familiar. Very likely they are drawn to the life, and we can only, as any other ignorant person might do, pass on them the criticism that we do not find them particularly entertaining. We feel more at home in commenting on the expression. " pedal delinquency." Who would imagine this to mean a young lady's- habit of wearing out her shoes too fast ? We hope that we shall never see again from Lady Wood's pen such poor work as Sorrow on the Sea.
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