The Press.
London, England, 1856-09-20 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

of persons and things, which hitherto had only reached us
through the misty medium of mere hearsay or newspaper
gossip, and rattled away, for amusement, over ground and
through scenes and places which we had only casually
heard of, but which seemed to him as familiar as house-
hold things, I began to wonder whether one so young (for
he was not more than twenty-one, if that age) could have
really seen so much; while Mary, quite absorbed in the
narration, and evidently more wonderstruck than I was,
listened, and smiled, and appeared by her puzzled air to
think it all very marvellous but very true.

Alfred Montiomerie, who was a year or two older, formed
a striking contrast to his lighter-spirited kinsman: in
fact, I very soon began to perceive that in temperament
and character the young men differed in many essential
points. The elder one, after the first few minutes, suffered
his cousin to take the lead, and listened and smiled in a
listless, semi-apathetic sort of way to his most animated
details; but he never originated anything himself, although
he sometimes conected and sometimes plumed at the
superabundant vivacity of his enthusiastic relative. They
had been at College together at Cambridge—had mixed
since then a good dell in London society—had taken a
hasty run•throngh France, Germany, and part of northern
Italy—and were now on a summer trip through the south
of Ireland, without having any particular object in view.
In these perambulations the difference between them
seemed to be this—that whereas the younger saw every
thing, inquired into every thing, and enjoyed all with the
zest of youth and high spirits, his companion apparently
changed his location in order to get rid of his time ; travel-
ling from point to point and country to country, in search,
not of new scenes but of fresh sensations, which either
his constitutional indolence, or a dreamy and wayward sort
of pride taking refuge in reserve, prevented him from pro-
fiting by when they came.
I am now giving my perceptions of character, it may be,
a little in advance ; but, in truth, it required scarcely more
than a passing interview to perceive and distinguish at
least the superficial points of difference between them.
It was not, however, that the elder was either ignorant
or a fool, for what he said he said well, and there was both
brilliancy and novelty in his remarks, when he roused
himself so far as to make them ; but there was a sort of
sickly fastidiousness about him, which seconded his sloth,
or what appeared to be so, and influenced his thoughts,
acts, and comments ; so that, although his intellect seemed
quite as acute and far more discriminative than that of
his relative, yet he disdained to make use of it, or only did
so in order to criticise harshly what others advanced or
admired, and to reduce every thing, by a callous and co'd-
blooded philosophy of his own, to the lowest standard to
which it was possible to level it.

Mr. Alfred Montgomerie (in a manner that we
shall not explain) turns out to be Lord Lan-
dove, before the first volume is over, and
Eveleen is of course in love with him ; but
matters do not go straight. The following
passage is not natural. Eveleen meets Mr
A. Montgomerie," knowing well who he really
was :

Evidently, he expected to be cordially if not warmly met
by me, for he stretched forth his hand and expressed his
delight in almost unmeasured terms ; while I, with a
throbbing heart, but a measured and grave demeanour,
responded to his advances after the predetermined fashion
which I had marked out for myself. A reception like this
was evidently nolooked for, and unwelcome to him. His
colour rose, and his eye fell. He paused—faltered, and
then, when he addressed me again, his voice, which had
been all eagerness at first, became almost as ineuared and
frigid as my own—
"Am I to have the great unhappiness to believe that
you are displeased to recognise me, Miss Redgreave ?" he
demanded.

" By no moans displeased, my lord," was my guarded
reply.

He started, and stared at me—

"My lord !" he exclaimed. " And how do you know
that I am a lord—or, if I am, should that be the canse of
my being received rather as a stranger than a friend?"
" Are you not the Earl of Landure ?" was my indirect
reply to the donble query of his.
" I admit it : but, nevertheless, I am Alfred Montgo-
merle also," he rejoined. " I have a patronymic as well
as a title, and, as 1 find it much the more convenient of
the two, I generally adopt it when I can. And now may
I venture to repeat my wish to know how yon discovered
that Alfred Montgomerie and Lord Landore were one and
the same person?" _ _ .

"1 head Miss Hetherington describe you, my lord,'
I replied, gravely; " and from what she said I drew my
own deductions. But the qnestion of your identity has
nothing whatever to do with the purpose which brought
me here, in the hope of meeting you before you entered
my uncle's house."

But why did not Eveleen meet his advances
more readily, as the ye ung peer was so well
inclined towards her ? That was because she
conceived " a singular purpose " (p. 197), of
which one result should be, finding subject-
matter for three volumes. Further, then she
attempts to give loose to her feelings, and
describe her sensations :

Hitherto I had evaded this necessary task by practising
one of those pieces of mental jugglery more frequently
adopted than owned, and which, like the cloud of smoke
that overhang-4 the field of battle, conceals the many
perils which it connot prevent. Strong in my own resolve,
and guided by a principle which I had chivalrously
adopted with all the enthusiastic ardour of eighteen,
had thought less of the consequence than the cause, and
seriously proposed to myself the difficult task of damming

SATURDAY,

up the well-head of passion, without reflecting that the
living waters were boiling and bubbling beneath. I
thought 1 was a philosopher ; but alas ! [ was only a
woman after all. I waa cold as winter on the surface; •
but the ice once broken, the pressure once taken off,
and what then became of the stoicism which exorcised
indulgence, and proposed to convert human feeling
into something that resembled a well regulated timeline .1'
Fool that I was! my very look, my very gait, every
movement of my limbs, every pulse of my throbbing heart,
betrayed me.
1 had ventured to engage in a contest with passim,
and felt that I was conquered in my own despite. I
had sat on the seashore like Canute; but, unlike him,
although I had read a lesson to others, I had not profited
by it myself. I loved I loved ! The very delirium of
passion was on me : I felt it to be so as I paced up and
down my narrow chamber, and threw open the lattice to
give myself breath. The struggles of another had awakened
my own ; the mysterious influences which had prostrated
the proud beauty, the vain woman, the very creature
of conventionality—taught her to forget the world, to
abjure the principles of a life spent amongst the heartless
and the wisdom learned in their school—had compelled
me to succumb as well as her. I could not think,
could only feel—feel that I loved, feel that I was beloved:
that draught quaffed out of the crystal cup of paradise,
and bringing always intoxication, and sometimes ruin,
madness, and despair to those who drink. Reason had.
no part in me at present ; it might come again, by and
by, when my brain cooled and my blood resumed its
wonted flow ; but now I could only wonder at myself for
wanting it—could only smile at the folly, yet sigh to
think that it must end—could only struggle in the toils.
which every effort of mine showed me 1 was powerless to
break.

Intense writing, truly, of the kind called
" gushing " by Mr. Charles Dickens (to whom
thiv. novel is dedicated). But the passage
then proceeds into what we must call hysteri-
cal Milesianisin of the old school of dislocated
metaphors and stunning similes :

I had hitherto turned the mirror of my own mind with
its face to the wall, and steadily refused to look into it, lest
another form should appear in it as well as my own ; I had
carefully closed the gates of young imagination—bolted
and barred them, as I thought, against the intrusion of
any shapes, sere those which I chose to admit myself ;
and, lo ! now, against my sill, the mirror resolved and the
portal opened ! There, on the disc of the one and at tho
threshold of the other, stood the Past with its pleasant
memories, the Present with its intense feelings and many
drawbacks, and the Future looming in the distance and
beckoning with its shadowy finger, as if, like Macbeth's
airy dagger, " to marshal me the way that I was going."

" Mirror of my mind "—" gates of young
imagination " (!)—" disc of one, and threshold
of the other "—" Future looming in the dis-
tance"—" shadowy finger "—ail crammed into
a dozen lines ! A jolly high sheriff, in re-
turning thanks for his health at a late county
meeting, is reported to have described himself
as being " catawampously chawed up ;" and
the foregoing passage is enough to impart a
similar sensation, and is as wonderful as any
" enormous melon " recorded at this unevent-
ful period of the year.
In spite of its deficiencies, " Eveleen" ex-
hibits talent, and gives strong ground for
believing that its author is capable of doing
better things. The same can rarely be affirmed
of novels by novices in the art of fiction. Let
the writer study Shakes: eare and nature, and
her conceptions of character will acquire more
dramatic reality. Her constructive ability in
putting a plot together is of a high order, and
reminds us of the late Miss Ellen Pickering's
special talent in that branch, so important to
a novelist.

The Influence of Christianity upon International
Law. Hulsean Prizo Essay in the Univer-
sity of Cambridge,lB34. By C. M. Kennedy,
B.A. Cambridge : Macmillan and Co.
IN drawing a comparison between the nations
of antiquity and those of Christendom relative
to such a question as the above, due care must
be taken not to lose sight of many disadvan-
tages under which the former laboured, ii,de-
pendent of their ignorance of divine truth. In
the first place, when the limits of this earth
were so inaccurately known, and its surface so
thinly populated—when civilisation was so
partial, and concentrated in such compara-
tively petty localities, beyond which the
human race existed only in a state of bar-
barism, either luxurious as in Asia, or savage
as in Gaul and Spain—it was inevitable that
States such as Athens and Rome should be
!taunted by very different sentiments towards
their neighbours than is enjoined by the
superior enlightenment of modern times. All
the rest of the world was barbarian ; and this
inferiority alone constituted, it was thought,