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

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are out of date, and both Carleton and Lever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, and
on the other stood the mother, the care on her brow
blanching into conviction, and all her tremulous anxiety
calmed with .1 determination not to disturb this last sem.
It was the last. Hope could not stand before the look 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 aTthholsei e
ss onw day t
hehso
house, and
oaunsde h od gloom
every
thought
and a a
nda reit,neiesys,hwwwne ndd
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 hedgerows, 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 about 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
hereAt
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
ntotlyfe,tethheitrhesoblltnfrtbiumrdtehne
of the men, by this time, had ventured to light tor h
other side.o
th Re abpuis
tl
_t)we'