meaning of the original, but carelessness of the life that is in words? The slow induction, the careful sifting comparison, the spiritual sympathy, so to speak, which alone enable a scholar to understand Plato, or a philosopher to read the material world, must surely be applied to the Greek of the New Testament if we would know its true compass and significance by a profounder insight than we have. The severe beauty of the Vulgate and our own homely and noble English version have partially set aside and obscured their original by the chain of words that come native to our thought and the long link of household associations. Such work as Erasmus's was is dreaded by many as a wanton iconoclasm, a defacing, if not a destruction, of the holiest forms of faith. Perhaps the very fear is the best argument that the task needs to be done again. Of all phases of bibliolatry, that which prefers the copy to the original is surely the strangest. For ourselves, we can only express our firm confidence that the Gospels will never lose by being studied in the very words of the Evangelists.

ART. IV.-CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD.

Chronicles of Carlingford: Salem Chapel. W. Blackwood and

Sons.

WITHOUT presuming to lift the veil which covers all anonymous authorship, we shall venture to assume that no one but a woman could have written Salem Chapel. Its merits and its faults are not easily explicable on any other ground. The delicate observation and subtle analysis of character, no less than the incapacity for broad effects, are alike feminine. A man could hardly have painted men so ill, or women so well. Nevertheless we start from this assumption chiefly to vindicate our right of calling the novelist "she" by hypothesis, and without much caring though the woman should turn out to have “a great peard under her muffler." What we have to say concerns rather the substance of the book, than the individuality of its author.

Salem Chapel consists of two different and incongruous parts, the plot of a sensation novel, and a series of descriptions of the inner life of a dissenting congregation. The plot may be dismissed summarily as not only bad but unnecessary.

It assumes a young girl of puritan education and high character going off on a most improbable story with her lover, who, unknown to her, is a married man; it rescues her by the intervention of the lover's wife, who shoots her husband in his room at an inn, a few hours only after she has traced him there, and with so much ingenuity as to defy discovery; and it represents the authorities as desisting from all inquiry on the simple statement of the wounded man, that he exonerates one person who has been wrongfully apprehended, and that he will give no further particulars. The worst of it all is, that these improbabilities, and many pages of horrors piled upon horrors, terror, despair, and suspense to the innocent victims of Colonel Mildmay's crime, only divert the reader from the main purpose of the book. For its purpose, which the plot rather impairs than strengthens, is to show the weakness of enthusiasm, refinement, and mere well-meaning, in contact with the vulgar realities of every-day life. The hero, Mr. Vincent, has come down fresh from Homerton to preside over the destinies of Salem chapel, and, as he believes, to sustain the cause of Nonconformity against the dead-weight of a corrupt Church establishment. He is disgusted by his vulgar deacons, who tell him to his face that he is their servant; he is indifferent to the senior deacon's daughter; his heart is captive to the great lady of the town, the Anglican Lady Western; and he sways backwards and forwards between his habits of old thought and his taste; a smile from Lady Western, or a rough speech from the butterman, pretty much determining his allegiance. Then comes the great trial of his sister's unexplained elopement, followed by her apparent complicity in a murder. The routine of chapel work becomes doubly odious under great mental anxiety; and while he grows in breadth and spiritual insight, he is less fitted than ever to cope with the demands of his flock for visits and tea-meetings. Gradually it flashes upon him that "a cure of souls cannot be delegated to a preacher by the souls themselves who are to be his care." He resigns his charge, and turns literary man. The moral is not offensively obtruded; but it reads suspiciously, at least, like a special pleading for an established church.

This under-current of theological purpose has a little impaired the unity of the book, while it has probably heightened its interest. It is a palpable fault that Vincent is made too much a gentleman for his position, in order that the sharp contrasts of refinement and vulgarity may be better brought out. Men equally sensitive to interference are no doubt born in every section of society; but such men would be gratified and conciliated by much of the vulgar kindness that stifles Vincent.

It is surely a little overstrained, when the minister thrills "with offence and indignation" because pretty Miss Phœbe Tozer brings him round, soon after his arrival, a shape of jelly "that was over supper last night." A more genial man would probably take the whole affair in the spirit of simple goodnature that prompted the gift; and it is scarcely fair to mix up the deficiencies of an over-sensitive temperament with the faults of the Voluntary system. After all, there are many parts of England where the clergy of the Establishment live on the same homely and cordial footing with their parishioners. But, in fact, Vincent's nature is throughout over-wrought, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish whether the author means him to be laughed at or admired. His innocent entanglement in the draught-net of Lady Western's admirers; the curious interweaving of his convictions and his little social annoyances; his hysterical fits of passion, and helplessness when the time for action comes,-are all true to the life of a weak, and in some respects a ridiculous, man only. He is always giving a subdued groan, or straying into the clerical counterfeit of an oath, or grasping hands "in an overflow of gratitude and compunction." There is something positively revolting and most unmanly in the scenes where he threatens Mrs. Hilyard with denouncing her to the police, not from any stern sense of duty or any urgent need of clearing his sister's fame, but rather from an impulse to satisfy himself by doing something, and latterly even from a certain hardness of mood that would like a victim. Yet we hold, on the whole, that the author intended Vincent's as the type of a high character. As a woman, she perhaps overrates the interest that his power of loving genuinely lends him in the eyes of half the world; but, as an artist, she was right in giving consistency to his character by at least one strong sentiment. Not that his religious feelings are insincere, but they are loose colours, and will not stand the test of rough weather. The man is unable to pray or preach out of himself; and his troubles are not disturbing, but controlling, elements in his speculation. All this makes him the more genuine and effective, but the less real. It is impossible to overrate the advantage for an orator of being able to transfuse his personal resentments or his last experiences into his pleadings for a great cause; but the power cannot in its very nature be longer-lived than the man's hatreds or sufferings. We only know Vincent in a short novel that concerns itself with some two months of his career. The accident of an uneventful or a changeful life must, we may be sure, have determined his after-history; and if he did not run the gamut of Protestant variations, we may infer that his home was quiet and

prosperous. In the fact that he is not self-poised or self-contained, lies all that makes him distasteful to common men, and his peculiar charm for the author of Salem Chapel. She seems to be at once attracted and repelled by enthusiasm; to recognise something godlike in every man who acts fearlessly upon honest impulses, and yet, from invincible good sense or artistic instinct, to see clearly the foibles and follies of the enthusiastic temperament. Probably to a great extent her pencil is truer than her purpose, and she draws honestly what she has analysed subtly and grouped well, without regard to her own philosophy of art. Probably also her experience of life, a little depreciatory it may be, has yet taught her that there is infinite good mixed up with the infinite littlenesses of human nature and society. She is unconscious of the force of her own satire, because she knows so clearly what large allowances she has made.

In strict keeping with the unheroic hero are his surroundings and friends. We pass over for the moment the inimitable deacons and their families, who are not of the stuff of which romance is made. Colonel Mildmay, the shadowy debauched villain, and Mr. Fordham, the shadowy well-meaning gentleman, like the curate of St. Roque and Dr. Rider, are rather lay-figures than flesh and blood. When all are summed up, and the separate feeling for each analysed, the reader will probably be surprised to find how largely contempt, good-natured genial contempt at best, makes up his estimate. And if this be true of the men, among whom Tozer almost struggles out of the ridiculous, the same, or even worse, may be said of the women. Mrs. Hilyard, who is in fact Mrs. Mildmay, the clever, desperate wife of a villain, who has driven her to live separate, and who tries to carry off their daughter that he may speculate with her in marriage, is a little coarsely sketched. The restlessness, the energy, the desperate unreasoning love, are all admirably given in their way; but the one fatal vice of sensation novels, the necessity for stage-effects, has driven the author upon attempting something more. We disbelieve in the midnight conversation with Colonel Mildmay, precisely because a woman who announces her intention to murder with so much calmness, and rallies her husband on a fastidious feeling about the gallows, can hardly be compact of good to the extent Mrs. Hilyard is meant to be. It is true that the mind may easily grow familiar with the thought of a great crime by long brooding over it, so that when temptation and opportunity offer, the passage from inaction to guilt is almost imperceptible. But here there has been no real occasion for such devilish casuistry. Mrs. Hilyard has been able to carry off and conceal her child, and it is even a question if

the law would not secure her its exclusive custody. Nay more, the idea of murder is represented as occurring for the first time in this interview, and as suggested by a chance word of her husband. The training of an English lady, her own habit of theological speculation, and her daily intercourse with respectable well-meaning people, are all strong reasons why homicide should not flash on the mind, and be instantly caught at and cherished as an expedient. There are other smaller traits in Mrs. Hilyard's character which strike us as inconsistent with herself. She is meant to be a lady of high breeding, who, from oddness, self-assertion, and carelessness of the world's opinion, permits herself to say rude things pretty much at random among her friends. The character is not exactly uncommon; but, in a woman of shrewd observation and real good-nature, social tact at least would determine the sphere of action within very definite limits. Mrs. Hilyard may say what she likes to Lady Western, but she would be more careful with the young minister, though she likes him, and reads his secret, and a little despises him. The jokes about the butterman and the dairywoman, in whose circle he is moving for the time, are essentially vulgar. The interviews with Mrs. Vincent are more wanting in self-restraint than the meeting of one woman with another, a stranger, and not a friendly one, is likely to be in actual life. The nervous excitement, which is to make the attempt at murder intelligible, is perpetually obtruded on us in the book, that we may understand the catastrophe when it comes. The one great fault of art has involved a thousand minor incongruities. But either the sharp intellect and resolute will, or the feverish spasms of bearing and action, are improbable. We prefer to strike out the crime and the tricks of manner that lead us up to it, as anomalous.

On the other hand, the characters of Lady Western and of Mrs. Vincent are thoroughly of a piece, and are so excellent in their conception as to be originals. It may seem a little harsh to compare the minister's mother to Mrs. Nickleby, yet the difference is chiefly in the far more exquisite workmanship which softens and refines the traits of the Lonsdale widow. Through out Mrs. Vincent is a lady at heart and a good mother, and is therefore recommended by all the enhancements of refinement and tenderness; and yet these are not the qualities by which any one reading the book remembers her. The absolute want of judgment and will which make her a cipher in her daughter's emergency are so perfectly contrasted with her tact of manner and address in handling her son's congregation and in baffling awkward questioners, that she not only lives herself in the pages of Salem Chapel, but is the occasion of life to others. It is not