The Press.
London, England, 1858-09-18 00:00:00

I.'HE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 18, 1858.
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1

half is occupied with their love-making. This is
all told in the most natural and easy style, and
many pretty sketches of English country life and
picturesque groupings are woven into it. Up to
this point Eva is the happiest of women, though
her lover has never formally proposed to her ;
but in the middle of the second volume a change
comes over the scene :

The first cloud that obscured the fair sky of Eva's bliss
came in the shape of a letter. A letter from Ernest,
mitten a few days after his departure from Hislop. Mrs.
Herbert opened the bag, looked significantly at the letter,
anti handed it to her niece. It was a long letter, but not
of unusual length fur him ; it contained several pages very
closely written. Eva drew but one from the envelope and
read it. She did not observe that her aunt was furtively
watzhing her while she read : her face was bent over the
letter, and she was not aware of the stealthy glances cast
upon her. As she read, her face became grave and a little
downcaat ; more than once tears gushed impulsively to her
eyes. In a short time she left the room. In her own—
the door bolted—the remaining sheets were drawn forth,
and first, hastily, and then slowly and attentively perused.
The bright and sunny look again dropped from that soft
brow, and she sat pensive and meditative, a look of puzzled
won ler in her eyes as if trying to realize unexpected dis-
appointment. She was disappointed in her letter. It was
not the kind of letter she hail expected would follow his
lest visit—nay, more, she could detect in it a difference
from his other letters ; so slight a difference, indeed, that
tact lese refined and acute than that of a woman who loves
would never have discovered it ; but subtile and wily must
be the dissimulation that eludes the vigilance of that all-
penetrating magician Love :—to any other Ernest's letter
would have read a counterpart of his former ones ; but it
did nut read so to Eva, or she would not have thus sat
listless and perplexed, the open letter on her knee, and the
sunshine darkened on her brow. True that the letter, as
multi, recapitulated all his movements from the time he
had parted with her until the hour he was writing it, told
even the time of his going out and coming in, but there
was more fact and less sentiment in the narrative than was
wont. He told her he should not be able to see her again
until she went to Oakstone ; he expressed regret for it, but
he gave no reason, he lett her to infer that it was caused
by the annoyance he had experienced from Mrs. Herbert
duringr, his last visit. In his writing there was a constraint,
as if he were not telling all he had to tell. He hinted
obscurely at inclination often running counter to duty, and
he spoke with a tinge of sadness of the slight portion of
happiness which fell to.the lot of mortals : all this from a
lover who had just expressed his love and been assured of
its return, sounded very strange. At the conclusion of the
letter he said he thought he had told her everything that
could in any way interest her. What boundary was he
drawing? Every thing connected with him had interest
for her; he was used to think so when he outpoured every
secret thought in trust and confidence before her.

When Eva went to bed that night she read the letter
over again, and for the first time since she had been corre-
sponding with him, instead of putting it under her pillow
with a smile seraphic m its love and peace, with a sigh
she placed it between the leaves of the Bible from which
she hsd been reading the evening chapter, and laid it aside
where she should not see it.

The cloud, however, passed away for the time,
but only to return blacker and heavier than
before, and charged with a tempest of affliction
for the too credulous and lovesick damsel.
Ernest's father and his sister Agnes have set them-
selves steadily against the match—have impressed
very strongly on the lover that he must marry
for money. lle gives way to their representa-
tions, and after torturing Eva by his assumption
of coldness and indifference, at length breaks the
fatal truth to her that all the past must be
forgotten. So ends the first part of " Eva
Desmond."

Agnes had wanted for herself; is in love with
Miss Myra, who had always taken Eva's part.
Mr. Stanhope makes a great impression—be-
comes very popular—and Eva is as happy as the
day is long.
Time rolls on. Ernest's wife goes into a mad-
house, and Ernest himself into the Church of Rome.
Young Edward succeeds to the inheritance of
Oakestone, which he rapidly dissipates, and the
house itself is sold for the establishment of a
sisterhood. This was the end of marrying for
money. Eva, on the other hand, sees her hus-
band advance from the curacy to the rectory;
from that to the dignity of archdeacon ; and at
the close of the third volume we find him on the
right rev. bench. Eva meanwhile has had an
opportunity of paying back good for evil to
Ernest Clifton. She discovers in a little gipsy
boy a natural son of that unfortunate man, whom
she adopts and educates. His talents are of the
highest order. He becomes a professor. And,
to judge from the final scene, there is a proba-
bility that the son of Eva's first lover will be
happier in his wooing of another Eva than his
miserable parent.
Such is a very brief outline of this interesting
novel. On the whole, it reminds us more of Mrs.
Marsh than of any other writer of the day. But
no clue to the authorship is furnished by the
titlepage.
The characters in " Eva Desmond " are almost
all well drawn. The two which challenge most
attention are of course Eva and Ernest Clifton.
The latter, we think, is very true to human
nature. It is difficult to describe him—nequeo
monstrare et sentto tantum—but many of our
readers, we think, who have been mixed up with
ecclesiastical enthusiasts will have met with such
a man,—the man so occupied by a sense of
divine obligations as to be liable to forget human
ones, and whom the most fervid religious aspira-
tions are powerless to preserve from baseness in
his worldly dealings. Eva herself it is difficult
to praise too highly. She is full of fun, and full
of seriousness ; a pretty flirt, and a sober matron ;
a graceful and refined lady, who can busy herself
about her husband's collars, and is not
ashamed of being caught bthe bishop dining
on potatoes and milk. Whether her cor-
dial acceptance of Charles Stanhope so soon after
her heart had been broken by Ernest Clifton is
quite true to nature is a question on which we
leave the authoress to ponder. Old Mr. Clifton,
too, the petty disciplinarian, impatient of every-
thing that did not originate with himself, is a
capital sketch.
The language of this story is pure and simple.
There is in it no striving at effect, and no pur-
purei panni. When the author would describe
emotion, he does so successfully, in virtue of his
natural sympathy with it. The conversation is
the conversation of gentlemen and ladies, and
evinces an easy familiarity with the usages of
cultivated people.
The moral is perhaps rather too commonplace.
That love is better than a stalled ox, the world
has been told already ; and that a heavy retribu-
tion awaits the trifler with a female's affections,
is a recognized axiom with novel-readers. We
may, however, say of "Eva Desmond" that the
plot is ingenious and the narrative graceful ; that
the characters show considerable observation of
life ; and that the moral is not below the average.
The patronesses of the circulating-libraries may
send for many a worse novel than " Eva
Desmond."

recornm3nd this little volume to all persons intereste
in such questions, whether genealogically or politi
cally ; it is nicely printed and got up, and has sofa
useful zlotys by the translator.

A sensitive and devoted nature like Eva's does
not readily recover from such a wound as this.
However, she returns to her family in Ireland,
and bears her fate with as much resignation as
she may. Mr. Desmond's affairs are in such a
condition as to render his children's prospects
exceedingly precarious ; and it is under the pres-
sure of this conviction that Mrs. Desmond points
out to Eva the expediency of marrying, if she can
by any means reconcile her mind to the idea of a
new suitor. The necessary man is found before
long in the person of a young Irish curate, of
good family, and great university distinction.
Eva marries him, and love follows the marriage.
This portion of the story is the most charming
and graceful of the whole. Eva's little economical
shifts—her anxiety about her husband's dress and
appearance—her determination to cut his hair—
and her efforts to coax him into a clerical waist-
coat—are told with great fun and piquancy, and
bear, we think, unmistakeable traces of a lady's
pen. Here perhaps we may say that the second
division of the story ends.
The next part brings us back again to Eng-
land, where Eva's husband, the Rev. Charles
Stanhope, has obtained a curacy near Oakestone.
Ernest is married to Clara /seville—very rich,
but abominably ugly, and little more than
half-witted ; and Charles Oakley, whom Cousin

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED—Sepr, 16.
BOOKS.

The History of the British Empire in India. E. Thornton,
EF q.
Origin and Progress of the Ocean Electric Telegraph.
Johnscn
Roman Beauties and Trojan Humbugs. By Rattlebrain .

Tweedie.
I. James Martineau. Longman.

gßusit

A Handbook of the Principal Families in Russia.
By Prince Paul Dolgorouky. Translated into
English by F. Z. London : Ridgway.

WE don't exactly know what Mr. Thackeray might
say of this little volume,—he who has spoken so
cruelly of that " odious and disgusting Peerage "
which lies on so many of our drawing•room tables at
home ; but we ourselves are under the impression
that it is a very useful, as we are sure it is a very
interesting, hook. It is nothing, in fact, but a Rus-
sian ltvd-hook. But then in Russia it is said that
powerful influences for good are buried beneath the
degradation of the aristocracy, and in a very curious
introduction the author traces with great minuteness
the relations that have existed between the Czar and
the nobility from the earliest times to the present.
The highest nobility of the empire are all, it seems,
Varangians or Varagians, descendants of those fair-
haired life-guards of the Byzantine Empire of whom
Scott has left us a portrait. It is remarkable, by the
by, that the posterity of those men whose duty it was
to guard Constantinople from invasion should now
be among the foremost of her assailants. We can