A.NDERSEN'S TWO BARONESSES.

IT seems singular that those persons who are most exposed to the hard realities of life and undergo the lowest extreme of fortune often have the untruest and narrowest ideas of the world and the people in it. No two living writers of any kind of note have had greater opportunities of seeing human nature in its unguarded or naked moments, or have felt the actualities of things more sternly, than Thomas Miller and Hans Christian Andersen ; yet few writers so abound in wordy sentiment, or present us with representations of life where the truth is so coloured by the hues of fancy, or have such narrow ideas of that world through which they have struggled. Accident and experience gave its character to Andersen's first novel, The Inzprovisatore: the scenery and arts of Italy were suited to his fanciful but somewhat dreamy manner of thought and style ; he had long and bitter experience of patronage. The com- bination gave a truth, though somewhat flimsy and aerial, to the work ; but that story seems to have exhausted his ideas of the elements of life, so that ever after he was driven to repeat himself. A patron and the object of patronage generally turn up in some form in his tales, of course growing more stale at each repetition; while the other parts and persons consist of mere description, or of events in which the extreme and the commonplace are curiously jumbled together. Mixed with these defects is a laxity of moral tone, at present characteristic of Northern Europe, which substitutes a sickly sentimentalism for the "vices of the blood" that our ancestors avowed, if they did not glory in, without, however, making them matters of maudlin interest.

The Two Baronesses seems intended by the author as a novel of manners rather than of incidents. Such a tale can undoubtedly dispense with rapid and stirring events and with great variety of fortune; but it requires the story to be more probable in proportion as it is less strik- ing, the incidents appropriate to the life and manners that are to be exhibited, and the manners and persons to have novelty and character in themselves, in order to create interest. Such qualities were possessed by the better novels of Miss Bremer; they have been displayed, though in a less degree, in some of Andersen's own sketches. In The Two Baronesses there may be as much cleverness exhibited as on other occa- sions, but it tells less from being out of place. The sketches of manners often impede the story, besides, to say the truth, being too baldly natural to attract attention : they are as much silly as simple, either in them- selves or by the style of painting them. The Two Baronesses, however, is not a story of mere manners. Its elements consist of very extreme and in some parts distasteful incidents, according to English ideas of art. One of the Baronesses is the daughter of a peasant of the olden times, when the power of the nobles was intact, and often savagely enforced. Having suffered in her family and herself from the tyranny of her father-in-law, and subsequently from the bru- tality of her husband, she becomes an eccentric lover of the poor, and of virtue, without respect of persons : she is apparently designed to ex- hibit a remnant of a bygone time, with that strength and singularity of character which age and circumstances produce when society has been in a transition state : but the effort is not successful—" the Grandmother" is a bore. Her grandson is the mystery of the book : he is forbidden the old lady's presence except on rare occasions ; he is driven from home to travel and take his chance in foreign lands ; he comes home in time to resale the heroine; and it turns out that he is supposed to be the son of an Italian brigand, who forcibly carried off his mother on her marriage. Such are Hans Christian Andersen's healthful notions of romance !

The heroine is a foundling, the daughter of a strolling organ-player, whose wife is benighted in a storm, and perishes in giving birth to a daughter. The foundling is preserved by three young students ; is patron- ird by the Grandmother ; and is educated among some quaint old peo- ple and some amiable young ones, who sit for pictures of Danish manners, varied by Andersen's metaphysics. Elizabeth, the foundling, fancies she is in love with the grandson of one of her friends ; and it being supposed that her sailor is imprisoned for murder at Copenhagen, she goes thither secretly with a petition to the King, and encounters various incidents by the way ; the upshot of which is, that she is rescued from a position of danger that her simplicity does not allow her to see, by Baron Herman, the grandson, whom she finally marries with the Grandmother's consent.

The journey to Copenhagen is avowedly taken from Scott, and designed as a compliment to him—Elizabeth undertakes the task from her ac-

quaintance with The Heart of 3fid Lothian. In one point, however, there is no imitation : Effie Deans was in real danger of her life; but Elimar the sailor was not in prison at all, or even in the country—a revengeful vagabond had taken his name.

Such are the elements of The Two Baronesses—the peasant's daughter and the foundling. There are various characters and occurrences of a

level enough kind,—not forgetting the patron and artiste, with a tran- sient view of the strolling musician and the small player. These are not so much designed to exhibit either events or manners as the more direct

tale ; but they are to na the most truthful and readable parts of the book. Andersen is very good at a sketch, when he refrains from "improving nature" too much; but he wants stuff for serious events, real pasaion, and the story necessary to develop and embody them. From the preface ("dedicated" to his publisher, Mr. Bentley) we learn that Andersen has written The Two Baronesses in English : and the diction does credit to him as a linguist. As an average specimen, take the following picture of noble tyranny in the olden time.

"About sixty yearn ago, the lot of the peasant in Denmark was deplorable enough; he was not much better than a drudge. After villeinage, which King

Frederick the Fourth abolished, came bondage; almost all the peasants were serfs, and obliged to do military service until their fifty-second year: many young men endeavoured to escape this service by hiding themselves, and others disabled themselves in order to be free.

"The proprietor of the estate where this original Grandmother lived, her fa- ther-in-law, had been a reprobate fellow, one of the most barbarous men of his time, and about whom trulitim has preserved the most cruel remembrances. "An opening was still shown in the gateway, where the peasant was let down into what they called the dog's-hole.' The damps from the moat penetrated through the walls below, and in wet seasons the floor was covered with mud and

water, in which the frogs and water-rats gambolled at will: here they let the peasant down, and why? Often because he could not pay what was imposed on him for the miserable farm which the proprietor had ordered him to take and on

which the peasant's little inheritance was expended. The Spanish cloak,' which many an honest man had been compelled to bear, still lay in the tower; and in

the centre of the court-yard, where there was now a fine grass-plot and Provence roses, once stood the wooden horse,' on whose back the peasant had often sat, with leaden weights fastened to his legs, until he became a cripple; whilst the Baron sat in bis hall and drank with his good friends, or flogged his hotmds so that they howled in rivalry with the rider in the yard. "it is that time, that manor, and that lord of the manor, of whom we now propose to speak. "Some ragged peasant-boys stood and peeped into the court-yard: there sat a man riding the wooden horse'; it was -long Rasmus, as they called him. He had once saved a little money, and therefore the lord of the manor forced him to take a miserable half-ruined farm. Rasmus laid out his little all in the endea, your to improve it; but he could not make it much better, and they could not y the rent and taxes. The proprietor had every stick and stone valued, and t turned Rasmus, with his wife and child, out of the farm. Rasmus wrote a melancholy song about it, and was put in the dog's-hole' for his pains. When

he came out, they let him have a house in the fields, with scarcely any land to it, unless a little cabbage-garden and a piece of land in the pastures, about two acres, can be so called; and for this wretched shed and strip of ground he and his wife were obliged to work and drudge most of their time on the estate: he had

that morning complained that it was too bard a life, and for this he now rode on the ' wooden horse.' This horse was a narrow plank raised on two poles, and the

poor sinner was placed across it; two heavy bricks were fastened to his legs, that they might stretch them down, and that his seat on the sharp board might be more painful.

"A pale emaciated woman, her eyes filled with tears, stood and talked with the man who had a sort of temporary superintendence over the sinner—she was

long Rasmus's wife. The culprit had neither hat nor cap on; his thick hair hung down over his face, and he shook it now and then when the flies plagued him too mach. The heavy bricks weighed his feet towards the ground; but, however much he stretched out his toes, he could not reach it to get support.

"A little girl, three years of age, his and Hannah's child, and beautiful as an angel, toddled about in the grass; and whilst the mother spoke with the man

who kept guard, the child approached her father, and, either from the mother's instructions or from childish instinct, she pushed a stone noiselessly under one foot, so that he could rest on it. The child had already taken a stone up in the

same way, to slip it under the other foot, and looked, with her beautiful intelligent face, up to her father, when the Baron stood in the gateway opposite to them with his great riding-whip. He had observed what passed; and the whip cracked around the poor child, and it uttered a painful scream from the blow: the mother threw herself between them, but the Baron kicked the poor pregnant woman, who fell down on the pavement. "We will turn from this horrid scene, of which, in the so-called good old times,' there are too many to tell; and only state that this child, whose neck and

arm were swollen with the blow of the whip when she pushed the stone under her father long Rasmus's foot as he rode on the wooden horse,' was no other than the old Baroness, the Grandmother; for this child whom he struck became in time his son's wife."