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

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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 quits
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

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