The Press.
London, England, 1858-11-06 00:00:00

Xittraturt.

A Summer and Winter in the Two Sicilies. By
J ilia Kavanagh. In Two Vols. London :
Hdrst and Blsckett.
FOR Miss Kavanagh's novels we have no very
high admiration. In spite of the beauty of
her style, and a certain sort of interest which
her stories are seldom without, there is some-
thing about them which we have never been
able to like or approve. Their monotonous
cloying sweetness, and their uniform persistence
in the delineation of one side only of human
nature, seem hostile to all energy and vitality
of character, and calculated to inspire in their
readers no feelings but those of a morbid sen-
timentalism. They remind us of so many prose
versions of " Evangeline"—variations on the
same painful and pathetic air—with a more
seductive and therefore more misleading moral.
Consciously or unconsciously, Miss Kavanagh is
the most persever'ng literary disciple of Rous-
seau now extant, and if the rush and hurry of
English life left time for any book to work upon
and sink into the mind, there is no writer
against whose influence on the young we should
be so much disposed to warn our readers as the
authoress of " Nathahe " and "Adele.
Holding these views, which we have expressed
on a former occasion, and disliking, as we most
cordially do, the spirit and tone of most of her
writings, we are not by any means blind to the
good qualities which Miss Kavanagh undoubtedly
possesses. She is certainly a woman of genius
and imagination. She has a graceful and some-
times brilliant pen,—apt, indeed, to run into
over-luxuriousness, but even then to be pre-
ferred to the jejuneness of most contemporary
female writers,—much observation of character,
and a keen eye for the aspects of nature—for
the broad and simple effects of landscape, as
well as for the minuter details which help to
'vivify and complete a picture. It was, there-
fore, with much pleasure that we saw the an-
nouncement of a work before us which, from the
nature of the subject, would give little or no
opportunity for the exhibition of her peculiar
defects, and at the same time afford ample room
and verge enough for the display of her really
striking merits. Our expectations have not, on
the whole, been disappointed. Readers will find
in these volumes the glow and colour of Italian
skies, the rich and passionate beauty of Italian
scenery, and the fresh simplicity of Southern life
in its less sophisticated form, touched by the
hand of an artist, and described by the percep-
tion? of a warmhearted and sympathizing woman.
Any objection we may have to make will be
based, not on the failure of capacity or of literary
skill in the writer, but on the inadequacy of the
materials to which these gifts are devoted.
Miss Kavanagh takes us in succession to Sor-
rento and its neighbourhood, including Amalfi,
Paestum, and Salerno; to Naples, Baia, and
Pozzuoli ; to Palermo, and then back to Naples
and Pompeii. The first volume is excellent.
She stayed during the winter at Sorrento—a
season at which scarcely any. English are to be
found there,—and as antiquities were few and the
society nil, she was able to give her thoughts to
the study of the people, and her eye to uninter-
rupted feasting on the exquisite natural beauty
which everywhere surrounded her. In her pages
we seem to feel the full splendour of those un-
rivalled shores, which, unchanged except by the
.onvulsions of nature, still fascinate with the
tme charm that dazzled the eyes of Dorian or
To nian colonists, or in a later age roused the greed
of . fiercer Northern spoilers. Parthenope and her
sist, T cities, ever fresh and young, girdled by their
eine., sure of groves, and bathed by their sapphire
sea,l iave endured the scourge of armed invaders or
the ut theaval of the unquiet earth, and repaired the
rsvaga sof both with that eternal verdure which
adds a grandeur to desolation and a gracefulness
orangehite blossoms of the hang
side
ide with the red fruit of the preceding
)tiearddee,bcaya3s4 ".
the long broken outline of blue moun-
tain and
unny bay shows through the trellis-
work of le festooned from tree to tree. Burnt
into warm, yet subdued, colour by the long hot
summers, j e walls and cliffs throw up on their
rich yellow ?Aground the dusky grey of the
"Wow, Wire end tbo sombre green of the broad-