The Press. — London, England, 1855-04-14 00:00:00

358 bear in mind that the author of these pages, while he does justice to their great literary merits, has himself published, whether anonymously or under his own name, nearly as much in defence of religion as they did against it; and if, with powers so infinitely below theirs, he may hope to have obtained some little success, and done some small service to the cause of truth, he can only ascribe this fortune to the in trinsic merits of that cause which he has ever supported.• He ventures thus to hope that no one will suspect him of being the less a friend to religion, merely because he has not permitted his sincere belief so make him blind regard ing the literary merit of men whose opinions are opposed to his own. His censures of all indecorous, all unfair, all ribald or declamatory attacks, however set off by wit or graced by eloquence, lie has never, on any occasion, been slow to pronounce. - Of the merits of this first volume, containing the philosophers, we may say truly that there is seldom so much curious and instructive in formation conveyed in so popular and inte resting a form. There is about the style of Lord Brougham a complete absence of affec tation and an unusual power of narrative and description, both of which are combined in such articles as the " Life of Watt" or that of Sir Joseph Bankes in this volume. The work, indeed, forms a highly-entertaining specimen of biography and anecdote, often combined with scientific illustration. This edition of Lord Brougham's works, which are promised in quarterly volumes, has been got up with care and taste, and will, no doubt, be received by the public as a welcome addition to the collected writings of living authors of reputation. North and South. By the Author of " Mary Barton." Two Vols. London: Chapman and Hall. THE contrast suggested by the title of this tale is worked out by representing the life of a family of refined habits in a quiet, pretty village in a Southern county, in the first place, and by then changing the scene to a manufacturing town in the North, where the same family have to live amid the din of wheels, the smoke of factories, and the conflict of masters and " Knobsticks." Mr. Hale is the vicar of a small parish, with a ladylike wife, and one daughter, Margaret. There is a son, but he has been concerned in a mutiny against his captain (one of the brutal tyrants represented in nau tical dramas), and dares not return to Eng land. Margaret has resided for some time with her aunt, and the book opens with an interior in Harley-street. Margaret's cousin, Edith, is on the eve of marriage ; the estab lishment is to be broken up, and Margaret is to return home. To a gentleman who is in clined to pay her some attention, and who inquires concerning her home, she replies : All other places that 1 have seen seem so hard and prosaic looking after the New Forest. Helstone is like a village in a poem—in one of Tennyson's poems. And with this account the glimpses we are rmitted to catch of Helstone well agree. Margaret reaches it in the latter part of July : The forest trees were all one dark, dusky green ; the fern below them caught all the slanting sunbeams ; the weather was sultry and broodingly still. Margaret used to tramp along by her father's side, crushing down the fern with a cruel glee, as she felt it yield under her light foot, and send up the fragrance peculiar to it—out on the broad commons into the warm scented light, seeing multitudes of wild, free, living creatures revelling in the sunshine and the herbs and flowers it called forth. This life—at least these walks—realised all Margaret's anticipations. She took a pride in het forest. Its people were her people. She made hearty friends with them ; learned and delighted in using their peculiar words ; took up her freedom amongst them; nursed their babies; talked or read with slow dis tinctness to their old people ; carried dainty messes to their sick; resolved before long to teach at the school, where her father went every day as to an appointed task. The picture is pleasing and real-like. It is in those parts of England where there are wide spaces of unenclosed laud that rural life is to be most thoroughly enjoyed. It is provoking to be litnited in one's walks to roads and lanes, to be everywhere bounded by hedge rows, and in a heedless ramble to fear being charged with trespass. The in-door life of Margaret is less charming her mother is an invalid, with regretful recollections of her higher position in early days; and her father, apart from his grief for his son, is oppressed *lt has given me a most. heartfelt satisfaction to receive many communications from persons both at homo and abroad, witioh intimated their having been converted from irreligious opinions by the "Commentaries arid Illustranono of Paley; publiolisil iBB3 and /838. THE PRESS. by s. secret sorrow. Margaret sometimes thinks of her admirer introduced in the i open ing pages ; and when he visits her n the country, we think perhaps he may bear some part in the action of the story "Mr. Henry Lennox." Margaret had been thinking of him only a moment before, and remembering his inquiry into her probable occupations at home. It was " parler du soleil, et l'on en voit les rayons ;" and the brightness of the sun came over Margaret's face as she put down her board, and went forward to shake hands with him. He has his way to make in the world, but Margaret has won his heart. Will she listen to him? No. She can think of him " only as " a friend." Yet, when Mr. Lennox q uits Helstone, the reader is not without suspicion that he may appear again upon the scene. At length Mr. Hale finds courage to tell his sorrow to his daughter. He has grown grey in the service of the Church, but his mind has been lately awakened to scruples which compel him to quit her ministry and commu nion. The struggles of his conscience are set forth in some forcible passages. The strength of conviction which induced such a step might be expected to lead to some striking develop ment of character; but from this point Mr. Hale sinks into a very harmless, insignificant personage, and the incident, improbable in itself, has no other result than the break up of the Helstone home, bitterly deplored by all parties, and the removal of the family from South to North. Here the most pleasing por tion of the tale ends. In the manufacturing districts we are presented with the horrors of a strike, while the effort to make a hero out of a millowner is marked by violent exagge ration. Mr. Hale removes to a factory town that he may obtain pupils, and one of these is a manufacturer, Mr. Thornton. He had been removed from school early through the death of his father, in very miserable circumstances ; had got employment in a draper's shop, and for a time had supported his mother and sister on his stipend of fifteen shillings a week, saving three out of it. His frugality and energy prospered, and when he becomes Mr. Hale's pupil he is a thriving man, bent on " putting down " his workmen, on mastering Homer and Tacitus, and on realising a magni ficent fortune. Margaret thinks him a " tall, " broad-shouldered man," with an expression of " resolution and power" in his face," " saga " cious and strong as becomes a great trades man.' He rather rejoices than otherwise in conflict with his operatives. Why can they not be more prudent and attentive, and then they might rise to the rank of an overlooker or clerk, and be ranged on the side of authority and order ?—that is, be engaged in the master's interest. The " pinching sorrow " which Mar garet notices on the countenances of the poor Milton workpeople, he regards not as the consequence of their condition, but " the " natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed " pleasure at some former period of their " lives." When a strike is threatened, Mr. Thornton is for the strongest measures. " Rose-water surgery won't do for them. " Cromwell would have made a capital mill " owner. I wish we had him here to put down " this strike for us." And in this spirit he constantly speaks and acts. One of his opera tives describes him with great felicity : Did yo' ever see a bulldog? Set a bulldog on hind legs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo'll just gotten John Thornton. His mother is of the same stamp—a kind of Volumnia among the female community of millowners, always rejoicing in her son's battles with his natural enemies, the opera tives. " Her features, like her frame, wore " strong and massive rather than heavy." She sits in solitary state in "a grim, hand " somely-furnished dining-room," containing no book, " with the exception of Matthew " Henry's Bible Commentaries, six volumes " of which lay in the centre of the massive " side-board, flanked by a tea-urn on one " side, and a lamp on the other." Margaret, in her first interview with this matron, asks, " What do the people strike for?" and is an swered : " For the mastership and ownership of other people's property," said Mrs. Thornton, with a fierce exert. " That is what they always strike for. If my son's workpeople strike, I will only say they are a pack of ungrateful hounds. Unitive the smilers have a thing or Mu in, their SATURDAY, heads which will teach the men not to strike again in • hurry, if they try it this time." When a factory was threatened by " Knob " sticks" she went up to the roof, where there were heavy stones piled up, ready to drop on the heads of the crowd if they tried to force the factory-doors. It may be supposed that mother and son are perfectly suited to each other. " The very daringness " with which mother and son spoke out un " palatable truths showed a reliance on the " firm centre of each other's souls." The only other member of the family is a daughter, Fanny, who is " seldom without an ailment," who wonders how people can live without a piano, and who is introduced as " practising a morceau de salon, playing it very rapidly, every third note on an average being either indistinct or wholly missed out, and the loud chords at the end being half of them false, but not the less satisfactory to the performer." In short, Fanny is a very affected, silly girl, but not without a large admixture of spite in her composition. The dwelling of this family is minutely and, on the whole, very characteristically de- scribed : ----- - The lodge-door was like a common garden-door; on one side of it were great closed gates for the ingress and egress of lurries and waggons. The lodge-Keeper admitted them into a great oblong yard, on one side of which were offices for the transaction of business ; on the opposite an immense many-windowed mill, whence proceeded the continual clank of machinery and the long groaning roar of the steam-engine, enough to deafen those who lived within the inclosure. Opposite to the wall, along which the street ran, on one of the narrow sides of the oblong, was a handsome stone-coped house,—blackened, to be sure, by the smoke, but with paint, windows, and steps kept scrupulously clean. It was evidently a house which had been built some fifty or sixty years. The stone facings—the long, narrow windows, and the number of them—the flights of steps up to the front door, ascending ' from either side, and guarded by railing—all witnessed to its age. Margaret only wondered why people who could afford to live in so good a house, and keep it in such per fect order, did not prefer a much smaller dwelling in the country, or even some suburb; not in the continual whirl and din of the factory. Her unaccustomed ears could hardly catch her father's voice, as they stood on the steps awaiting the opening of the door. The yard, too, with the great doors in the dead wall as a boundary, was but a dismal look-out for the sitting-rooms of the house—as Margaret found when they had mounted the old-fashioned stairs, and been ushered into the drawing-room, the three windows of which went over the front door and the room on the right-band side of the entrance. There was no one in the drawing-room. It seemed as though no one had been in it since the day when the furniture was bagged up with as much care as if the house was to be overwhelmed with lava, end discovered a thousand years hence. The walls were pink and gold; the pattern on the carpet reve sented bunches of flowers on a light ground, but it was carefully covered up in the centre by a linen drugget, glazed and colourless. The window-curtains were lace ; each chair and sofa had its own particular veil of netting, or knitting. Great alabaster groups occupied every flat surface, safe from dust under their glass shades. In the middle of the room, right under the bagged-up chandelier, was a large circular table, with smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals round the circumference of its polished surface, like gaily-coloured spokes of a wheel. Everything reflected light, nothing absorbed it. The whole room had a painfully spotted, spangled, speckled look about it, which impressed Margaret so unpleasantly that she was hardly conscious of the peculiar cleanliness re quired to keep everything so white and pure in such an at mosphere, or of the trouble that must be willingly ex pended to secure that effect of icy, snowy discomfort. Wherever she looked there was evidence of care and labour, but not care and labour to procure ease, to help on habits of tranquil home employment; solely to ornament. and then to preserve ornament from dirt or de struction. It is with this family that the Hales, with their refined natures, are brought into close con tact. Margaret is suspected by Mrs. Thornton of having a design on her son ; and to under stand the effect such a suspicion would have on the young lady, we must glance at the account given of her. Margaret is rarely mentioned without some allusion to her proud beauty. She " looks queenly;" when walking in manufacturing Milton, " a large Indian shawl hung about her " in long, heavy folds, and which she wore as "an empress wears her drapery ;" she , has " superb ways of looking and moving; " her face has " a lovely, haughty curve," and she " wreathes her throat in a scornful curve. According to Mr. Thornton's account, she treated him with " haughty civility, holding( " herself aloof as if she had been a queen, and he her " humble, unwashed vassal." " 'What a queen she is," cries the doctor of Milton ; " What a saucy jade," exclaims Mrs, Thornton, At one time she has eat air of •me i