Samantha among the Brethren. By the Author of "Josiah Allen's
Wife." (Ward, Lock, and Co.)—This is an undoubtedly clever, and, within limits, successful, attempt to reproduce certain phases of American neo-Puritanism and country life. The author is, it is true, greatly helped by the peculiar dialect or contorted English in which she tells her story of female rights and " brethren's " eccentricities. After all, a sense of fun may be discovered in such writing as :—" If you set out to hunt beauty and goodness, if you take good aim and are perseverin'—if you jist track 'ern and feller 'em stiddy from mornin' till night, and don't get away a-follerin' up some other game, such as meanness and selfishness, and other such worthless head of cattle—why at night you will come in with a sight of good game. You will boa noble and happy hunter. At the same time, if you hunt all day for faults, you will come in at night with sights of pelts. You will find what you hunt for, track 'em right along, and chase 'em down." One finds similar " philosophy," preached in a dialect scarcely more uncouth, in the works of such an English writer as Thomas Hardy, and the chances are, therefore, that the author of "Josiah Allen's Wife" but slightly caricatures what is essentially racial. At all events, when one gets accus- tomed to the language in which she writes, one gets to enjoy what she has to say about the deacons who figure in her pages, and even about the everlasting "Conference," and " wimmen's" work. Comedy—with a grave face—is what she purveys chiefly; but there are not wanting sentimental passages and pathetic—even tragic—incidents. There is genuine power in the story of poor Ralph S. Robinson, done to death by church-bells and Deacon Garven, who is a "close communion Baptist by perswaisin, and a good man, so fur es firm morals and a sound creed goes." Then the romance of poor Submit Tewksbury and her "crystallised love and longin' of twenty years of faithfulness and heart-hunger and home-sickness," is really well told. Altogether, if the author of "Josiah Allen's Wife" cannot be placed among the first class of American humorists, she is entitled to a good place in the first division of the second class.
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