The Press. — London, England, 1858-11-27 00:00:00

r_ THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 27, 1858. 1162 our social life wanted the closeness that comes from habitual knowledge. She was blind, also, to the spirituality that lies under the serene depths of Saxon nature. Iler laurels have already begun to fade ; her descriptions of Ireland are out of date, and both Carleton and Lever have succeeded, by their superior variety and breadth of view, in writing down the fictions of Lady Morgan and, in some degree, superseding even those of Miss Edgeworth. Miss Austen did not write herself out. She wrote not much, and composed slowly and care fully ; and her posthumous fame has steadily risen. Miss Ferrier wrote not much, but admi rably. If the authoress of "Jane Eyre" had lived, it was to be feared that she would have continued to play on the one string of exagge rating the self-resources of female nature under temptations of extraordinary fascination. Yet her innate strength of genius might have enabled her to strike out a new line. Mrs. Marsh has repeated herself most painfully, and Mrs. Gore has done so almost avowedly. The last lady, however, has the perennial resource of a singu larly vivacious style, fresh, masculine, and strong, though she often degrades it to describing what is fade in sentiment and " used up" in soul. Iler "Cecil" showed power in educing new tones from the chords on which she struck so often ; and, as the wife of the private secretary of s Prime Minister, Mrs. Gore had many social advantages open to her, first in London and after wards at Paris, while her wit and brilliancy are undimmed even by the trials she has undergone. Mrs. Trollope certainly wrote herself out, and gradually sunk into being a coarse caricaturist. Lady Blessington was tolerated as a curiosity in the circulating library, and her books were bought by prurient people, until they found out by repeated experience that she was a very feeble novelist. Even her title of "Countess," her blaze in the ring with her showy carriage, her circle at Gore-house sparkling with literary and scientific celebrities, and her train of puffing paragraph-writers—even all these accessories could not float Lady Blessington's last novels. It was the literal fact that she could not find pub lishers for them. The public soon tires of the same manner in a writer or an artist. It will not answer to go on in the same vein working again and again. Novel-writers should consider that even Scott, with his rich imagination and hoarded knowledge, strove to bring new and fresh scenes before the reader. How different from each other were " Waverley" and " Ivanhoe," and " Kenilworth" and " Old Mortality "! But we turn to the authoress before us. We would not associate the authoress of " Mar garet Maitland" with the foregoing observations on over-production in fiction, if we were not afraid that there is danger lest she write too fast, and make too frequent appearances before the public. " The Laird of Norlaw " has many ex cellent passages in it, but the story is strained in conception, and there is a great falling off visible from the strong reality and natural scenes of "Margaret Maitland." It is a good novel as it stands, but we expected more from the writer. Those who liked her former novels will like " The Laird of Norlaw " also, but we arc sure that they will concur with us in thinking that the accomplished writer should take increased pains with her stories. The plot of " The Laird of Norlaw " is as follows :—A Scottish laird dies in pecuniary difficulties, and leaves behind him his wife and three sons. Prior to his marriage, the laird had been in love with a certain Mary of Melmar, an heiress, who had displeased her father by making a runaway match. The father cut her off, but relented when it turned out that no one could discover whither she went with her husband. The former and unsuccessful lover, the Laird of Norlaw, went in pursuit of the fair runaway, and spent several years fruitlessly trying to discover where Mary of Melmar had gone. His subsequent wife was little pleased at the extreme enthusiasm with which the Laird of Norlaw had worshipped Mary of Melmar. Time rolled by, and Mary's father made an extra ordinary will, leaving all his fortune to his daughter, and, in case that she does not reappear, the estate is devised to the family at Norlaw. After his death the Huntley family take posses sion of the Melmar estate, believing that they are he next heirs-at-law, as the (laughter has not tppeared, and as the Norlaw family could not take (as lawyers say), since Mary of Melmar could not be held to be dead. The case was certainly singular, and one of the young Norlaw men went to the colonies, hoping to make money wherewith he might recover the Melmar estate at law. The youngest of all, Cosmo by name, is seized with the paternal mania for trying to dis cover Mary of Melmar, and he goes to the Con tinent with that view, and, luckier than the gen tleman who devoted his time to searching for a needle in a load of hay, Cosmo succeeded in dis covering Mary of Melmar alive upon the Con tinent, and with two daughters, one of whom, Desk& by name, was then actually living as a governess at Melmar, along with the two Misses Huntley ! Here are a string of utter improbabilities heaped together like incidents in a Surrey drama. First, the notion of Mary of Melmar living away so long and allowing her daughter to go as a governess to Melmar, and that daughter (Desir4e) never to hear of the story of her mother, or to suspect how the case was, is quite strained and far-fetched. Cosmo being seized with the passion for discovering Mary of Melmar is also strained, though to be sure there is the object of the recovery of the estate for his family. It is also most fantastic to arrange that the daughter of Mary of Melmar (Desiree) should be located in the exact place from which her mother ran away. The authoress has considerable talent for describing houses and " interiors," and she relies much upon her descriptive powers. She would write a series of tales admirably, but her capacity for imagining people is not in propor tion to her gifts for describing scenery and external life. Her works are favourites with large classes of novel readers, and some portions of " The Laird of Norlaw" have given us much pleasure. We shall therefore make a few extracts. All the parts relating to the Laird of Norlaw's death and burial are vigorously penned. Here is the dying scene, in which there are some fine touches of natural pathos : The sun was shining into the west chamber at Norlaw. It was the room immediately over the dining•room, a large apartment, panelled and painted in a faint green colour, with one window to the front and one to the side of the house. This side-window looked immediately upon the old castle, and on the heavy masses of bluntleaved ivy which hung in wild festoons everywhere from this front of the ruin: and the sun shone in gloriously to the sick chamber, with a strange mockery of the weakness and the sorrow there. The bed was what used to be called a " tent-bed," with heavy curtains of dark•brown moreen, closely drawn at the foot, but looped up about the pillows. At the side neatest the sunshine, the mistress, whose place had been there for weeks, stood by the bed, measuring out some medicine for the sufferer. A fort night's almost ceaseless watching had not sufficed to pale the cheek of health, or waste the vigour of this wife, who was so soon to be a widow. Her fresh, middle-aged, matronly bloom, her dress careful and seemly, her anxious and troubled brow, where deep solicitude and hope had scarcely given way to the dread certainty which everybody else acknowledged, made a very strange con trast, indeed, to the wasted, dying, eager lice which lay among those pillows, with already that immoveable yellow pallor on its features which never passes away; a long, thin hand, wasted to the bone, was on the coverlid, but the sufferer looked up, with his eager, large black eyes, towards the medicine-glass in his wife's hand with a singular eagerness. He knew, at last, that he was dying, and even in the solemnity of those last moments, this weak, graceful mind, true to the instincts of its nature, thought with desire and anxiety of dying well. The three sons of the house were in the room watching with their mother. Huntley, who could scarcely keep still even in the awe of this shadow of death, stood by the front window, often drawing close to the bed, hut unable to continue there. The second, who was his mother's son, a healthful, ruddy, practical lad, kept on the opposite side of the bed, ready to help his mother in moving the patient. And at the foot, concealed by the curtains, a delicate boy of fifteen, with his face buried in his hands, sat upon an old square ottoman, observing nothing. This was Cosmo, the youngest and favourite, the only one of his children who really resembled Norlaw. The caprice of change was strong upon the dying man ; he wanted his position altered twenty times in half an bour. He had not anything much to say, yet ho was hard to please for the manner of saying it ; and longed, half in a human and tender yearning for remem brance, and half with the weakness of his character, that his children should never forget these last words of his, nor the circumstances of his dying. He was a good man, but lie carried the defects of his personality with him to the very door of heaven. When, at last, the pillows were arranged round him, so as to raise him on his bed in the attitude he wished, he called his children in his trembling voice. Huntley came forward from the window, with •a swelling heart, scarcely able to keep down the tears of his first grief. Patrick stood by the be•lside, holding down his head, with a stubborn composure—and Cosmo, stealing forward, threw himself on his knees and hid his sobbing in the coverlid. They were all on one side, a n d on the other stood the mother, the care on her br ow blanching into conviction, and all her tremulous anxiety calmed with .1 determination not to disturb this last se m. It was the last. Hope could not stand before the lo o k a death upon that lace. "My sons," said Norlaw, " T am just dying; bra y know where I am in this strait, trusting in my *trim. You'll remember I said this, when I'm gone." There was a pause. Cosmo sobbed aloud in the ailesee, clinging to the coverlid, and Hnutley's breast hea►ed high with a tumultuous motion—but there war not a word said to break the monologue of the father, who was going away' - - '• And now you'll have no father to guide you further" he continued, with a strange pity for them in his voice. " There's you mother at my side—as true a wife and as faithful, as ever a man had for a blessing. Boys, l leave your mother for her jointure the love you've had for me. Let her have it all—all—make amends to her. Martin, I've not been the man I might have been toyou." These last words were spoken in a tone of sudden compunction, strangely unlike the almost formal dignity of the first part of his address, and he turned kis eager, dying eyes to her, with a startled apprehension of this truth, foreign to all his previous thoughts. She mold not have spoken to save his life. She took hie hand between hers, with a low groan, and held it, looking ot. him with a pitiful, appealing face. The selfaceitarnion was like an injury to her, and he was persuaded to feel it so, and to return to the current of his thoughts. " Let yonr mother be your counsellor; she has ever been mine," he said once more, with his sad, ding dignity. " I say nothing about your plans, because plans are ill adjuncts to a deathbed; but you'll do your best, every one, and keep your name without blemish, and tear God and honour your mother. If I sser, to speak for a twelvemonth I could not find more to say." Here is one of the " interiors" so dexterously painted by the writer : e a T t h h o l se i e s s o n w day t hehso house, and o a u n s d e h od gloom every thought and a a nd a r e it , n ei es y s,h w w wn e n dd still bears an involuntary reference to the solemn inmate, resting unconscious of them all, went 51 wly over the roof of Norlaw. Sunday came, doubly mournful ; a day m which Scottish decorum demanded that no one should stir abroad, even to church, and which hung inde scribably heavy in those curtained rooms, and theingh the unbroken stillness of its leisure, upon the three youth% who had not even their mother's melancholy society to help them through tie day. The mistress was in her owe room, closely shut up with her Bible and her sorrow, taking that first Sabbath of her widowhood, a solitary day of privilege and indulgence for her own grief. Not a sound was audible in the house; Jenny, who could be beat spared. and who was somewhat afraid of the solemn quietness of Norlaw, had been sent away early this morning, to spend the Sabbath with her mother, in Kirk bride, and Margot sat alone in the kitchen, with a closed door and partially-shuttered window, reading to herself half aloud from the big Bible in her lap. In the perfect stillness it was possible to hear the monotonous hum of her half-whispering voice, and sometimes the dull fall of the ashes on the kitchen hearth, but not a sound besides. The blinds were all down in the dining-room, and the lower half of the shutters closed. Though the July sun made triumphant daylight even in spite of this, it was such a stifling, closed-in, melancholy light, bright upon the upper walls and the roof, but darkened and close around the lads, that the memory of it never quite passed out of their hearts. This room, too, was panelled and painted of that dull drab colour which middle class dining-rooms even now delight in ; there were no pictures cu the walls, for the family of Norlaw were careless of ornaments, like most families of their country and rant. A dull small clock upon the black marble mantelpiece, and a great china jar on the well polished, old-fashioned sideboard, were the only articles iii which anything beyond use was even aimed at. The chairs were of heavy mahogany and haireloth—a portion of the long dining-table, with a large leaf folded dowu, very near as black as ebony, and polished like a m , rmr, stood between the front windows—and the two round ends of this same dining-table stood in the centre of the room, large enough for family purposes, and covered with a red and blue table cover. There was a heavy large chintz easy-chair at the fireplace, and a little table supporting a covered work basket in the corner window—yet the mom had not been used to look a dull room, heavy and dismal though it was to-day. A sheriff's officer arrested the body of the dead laird, and a painful scene occurred. The bailiff went back to Norlaw with the body, and strata gem was had recourse to in order to bury the dead privately. The funeral was performed stealthily, under cover of night. We are tempted to make room for this painful description :-- And through that wild summer midnight—through the heavy roads, where their feet yank at every step, awl the fluttering ghostly branches on the hedgero ws, which cseglit the rude pall, a large black shawl, which had been thrown over the coffin—the melancholy clandestine procession made its way. When they had gone abou t half a mile, t y were met by the old post-chaise from the Norlaw Aram Kirkbride, which bad been waiting there for them. lii I relieving each other, the little party pmeeeded "wanl here At T length they came to weed, to the pebbly beach, w sal the ferryman's boat lay fastened by its iron ring hempen cable. But for the fortunate chance of findingce here, Huntley, who was nurivalled in all athletic esertiow had looked for nothing better than swimming ac d r river, ver e n to tly fe , te th h ei t r he so b ll t n frt b i u m rd t e h n e of the men, by this time, had ventured to light tor h other side. o th R e a b p u i s t l _t)we' L l C t B V~ tl 0 i. • r