The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-28 00:00:00

story, say we ? Rather should it be said, immediately
before the miscreant's demise, by a violent death,
through accident. It is here that we look upon the
work—exceedingly clever though it is, at its com-
mencement—as singularly and signally inartistic
and incomplete towards its conclusion. The
unravelling of the tangled skein of the plot, in
truth, is clumsy to a degree. The author is perpe-
tually, as it appears to us, stumbling upon a lost
opportunity. We will explain our meaning, while
saying this, by one solitary but perfectly sufficient
instance of its literal accuracy as an objection.
Martin Ashe is a wretch of the blackest possi-
ble dye. He is a wealthy country gentleman,
having a rent-roll of some £12,000 per annum, with
superb estates in Devonshire and in Cornwall, and
who—mastered solely by his own diabolical passions,
the passions of lust, of revenge, and so forth—perpe-
trates all manner of atrocities. He a murderer. He
wantonly commits arson. He is the merest acirnal
as a voluptuary. He is a sly and malignant tra-
ducer. He hesitates not one instant about perjuring
himself. In reality, as he is unmasked before us, he
excites only our uttermost abhorrence. And yet
the murder he perpetrates never once, from the
beginning to the end of the story, comes to be re-
vealed! A wretched exciseman, who seems at one
moment to be upon the trail towards its detection,
never really does detect it, but, on the contrary,
gets burnt to death in the endeavour. The Novelist
seems somehow to have, far more than
merely what one calls a sneaking liking for
his miscreant hero, Martin Ashe. He evi-
dently admires him for some inscrutable reason all
through the narrative ; and in effect some of the
closing portions of his story are in a manner bewil-
deringly apologetic for this very predilection. Some-
what as violently in opposition to all our notions
as to the social proprieties, us this unnatural predi-
lection in favour of the murderer, is the subjoined
record of the Funeral of Ailsie Adams :
Her funeral was largely attended by rich and poor, and
the mourners were not only numerous but sincere. Tho
coffin wns carried by a party of the Moorcombe coastguard,
and was covered with a new white St, George's ensign, and
the lieutenant of the station, in his uniform, followed as
mourner, together with most of the principal farmers
around ; and there was a large procession of school children
and of many of her old pupils, and a knot of weather-bronzed
sailors from the quay. And when Mr. Ashe had pronounced
the last words of the touching and beautiful church service,
the Moorcombe bells rang out a slow and solemn muffled
peal, telling all who heard them that the last scene was
over, and that the sorrowful was comforted and the weary
now at rest.
Hardly would it be conjectured by any one, merely
reading that as an extract quite apart from the
context, that the poor dead creatpre who is
thus buried away as reverently as though she had
breathed her last in the odour of sanctity, has been
solemnlyZ and formally, declared a Suicide by
the verdict of a coroner's jury—the old burial ser-
vice for such being performed at midnight, in a
cross-road, with a stake through the carcase ! en
reality the reader knows all the while—but nobody
else, not one of the characters in the narrative
that is to say, has the faintest inkling of
it—that poor Ailsie, William Ashe's mother,
Martin Ashe's victim, has been cruelly murdered
by the latter, after a scene as revolting as any we
ever remember to have read in any fiction. The
passion of the scene is tainted with a sense of
pruriency—the voluptuoueness of the description,
in fact, being only interrupted by a sudden and
startling display of unwomanly brutality on the
part of Ailsie, who pinions and horsewhips her
assailant, Martin, until he (strong man as he is)
faints away trader the agony of the castigation.
It is upon his recovery from his fainting fit that he
murders her—stealthily, surely—by means of the
most treacherous assassination. Yet it is this mur-
der that, even when we have finished reading the
last volume, never once has been brought to light !
Other characters in the story are admirably
sketched in upon the canvass, such, for example, as
the self-opinionated old Rector, Mr. Lee; his
feeble-minded helpmeet, Mrs. Lee; their cold-hearted
eldest daughter, Annette, who marries Martin Ashe,
the undiscovered murderer ; Mr. Moorse, the gene-
ral practitioner; William Ashe's college friend and
travelling companion, Courtenay—and a variety of
other very miscellaneous personages. Altogether
though flawed here and there very conspicuously
with blunders, blunders that might very readily, as
it appears to us, not only have been avoided,
but actually, by avoidance, transformed int o
advantages--the work is clever, even (in several
parts) if it be viewed strictly as a work of Art.
While it should be added that—if it be the writer's
first novel, his first story of such dimensions, its
excellence in many respects is very remarkable.