The Sun.
London, England, 1864-12-16 00:00:00

LATEST INTELLIGENCE.

FRANCE.

BOURSE, Dec. 15.—The market has been heavy,
and the business done shows lower quotations.
Threes, for the Account, are now at 66f. 20e., and
Mobilier at 933 f. 75c. Railway Shares rather
offered, with a slight &clue on some of the lines.
The market continued heavy to the close, and left
off as follows :

41 per Cents .. 93 50 I Italian Loan 65 55
Do. end month.... Do. end month 65 70
3 per Cents
Do. end month—, 66 25 New Mexican
-
Credit Mobilier.... 933 75 Russian
00. end mouth.... 932 50 Austrian
Bank Shares 359) Spanish Threes....
Credit k oncier 1240 Home Debt
Roman .. 71 Deferred
EtAILWAY4.

Orleans
Northern
Lyons and Medi turranoan
Southern ...

Cash. Account.
852 50 ~ 85.5
995 .. 997 50
875 .. 880
583 75 .. 553 75
515 .. 616 25
490 .. 492 50
316 25 31.5
435 .. 435
506 25 .. 506 25
372 50 .. 372 60
435 436 25
190 192 50

Western
Eastern ....
Sardinian
Austrian
Lombard ..
North of Spain
Saragossa
Ditto to Barcelona

LITERATURE,

Blount Tempest. By the Rev. J. C. M. Bellew.
Three vols. Hurst and Blackett.
At a single stride Mr Bellew has taken his place
among our popular novelists. " Blount Tempest"
is announced as his first contribution to imaginative
literature. It reads far more like the work of a
ski:led and practised romeraceswriter- Its author
evidences, in this first venture of his within the
magic circle of the world of fiction, a combina-
tion of rare qualifications in his newly
assumed capacity as a Novelist. Already
known as an accomplished elocutionist—he now
shows himself to be also an equally accomplished
mateof-letters. His style has no crudity. It has
the easy swing of one who has thoroughly mastered
the arts of composition. " Blount Tempest,"
viewed simply as a story, has the all-essential
charm of interest, and of an interest that at moments
becomes enthralling. It is full of incident. Its
plot displays in several particulars a Wonderful in-
genuity of contrivance. It is a plot that, through
all its intricacies, is coherent. The events are knit
together with surprising cunning and unerring
dexterity. We are conscious—when we come to
look back upon the whole scheme of the narrative
—of no one flaw in the manner of its construction.
We are barely caught, like the marriage guest,
upon the threshold, before we " needs must hear "
—our narrator holds us with his glittering eye, and
we read on, chapter after chapter, volume after
volume, so far as the preoccupations of life permit
of our doing so, uninterruptedly. The tale that is
here told, and told, too, in a manner marked by so
much exhilaratin; vivacity, has about it a certain
fascination. As, indeed, for that matter, any tale
that is worth reading at all should have. And we
have read it in consequence, not as a duty, but as
a pleasure. Having so read it, we commend it
accordingly. Mr Bellew is manifestly a keen
observer of his fellow-creatures. He has a
watchful eye for all their whims and oddities.
He has a very lively sense of the humorous. As a
delineator of character he is singularly felicitous,
and we should find it difficult to decide, were we
in any way required to do so, to which should be
accorded preference among his imaginary person-
ages—whether, as a class to his male or his female
characters are marked by superior excellence. The
scene of his story is placed for the most part either
in London or in Lancashire. Under a thin veil of
fictitious names—names but very slightly modified
from the original—localities are, here, described
that will readily enough be recognised by those
who are familiar with them. Too like might
be said, almost as truthfully, we believe of
several among the characters. Besides which, it
may here be added, by way of completing what
we have been remarking in regard to Mr, Bellew's
dexterous blending in "J3luunt Tempest'' of fact and
fiction, that more than one incident introduced in
the course of the narrative will be recognised by
some of the more keen observers in that-north coun-
try as the merest modifications or adaptations of
certain actual and well remembered circumstances.
Blount Tempest, the hero 'of the story, is the
twin brother of Geoffrey Tempest—the former
being the good, the litter the evil genius of
the narrative. Oat of the accident of his
brother's birth a few months earlier than
a
himse
of yearslf,Gecffre7f draws a jealousy that in the
course esters into an unnatural hatred,
prompting him to all kinds of dark and devilish
to robbery, and
ro m intrigues,robb e leadingry t
o a
ss him s
inf froglyingco. A murder occurs at
the very heart, as one may
y of the labyrinth of
the plot of " Blount Tempea.,,
as
It is described in the
very centre of the second volume, About it the
thread of the narrative gets tangled and inter•
twined, and ravelled 'up in Ipparently inextricable
confusion—dragging down'in its meshes, as in a
deadly net, the young hero of the tale, upon whom,
although as innocent of th, crime as an unborn
babe, every conceivable suspicion concentrates as
upon—the murderer ! The way in which—in the most
natural manner—all these fearful suspicious are
brought to accumulate upon Blount Tempest's head,
shows, on the part of Mr Bellew, the attainment
at once of a wonderous mastery of his art as a
Novelist, in the mere construction of the machinery
of his tale, in the cunning adroitness
with
which
his dexterous hand has thuadeltly put the various
incidents together. There L
not a minute detail
in this central part of the fiction—the moul-
daring tomb tenoug the Priary Ruins, where the
murder takes place, the scireted japan box, the
purloined pistol with which the fatal shot is fired,
the illuminated missal, th
--fafragment of the assas-
sin's coat, the pewter button upon that fragment
marked with the name otthesash clothier at White-
chapel—there is not one of the most trivial
among these seemingly insignificant particulars,
but has about it, for the nonce, an especial, in its
way a supreme importances Everything, more-
over, in this way, has lent before been foreseen
by the author, and carefully prepared for. Nothing
of all this, so to speak, is eittuile
y dragged in by
the head and shoulders, es by an afterthought. To
insist, again, upon what we have already specified
as a distinctive merit in the plot of " Blount Tem-
pest, we would repeat a phrase we have before
used in regard to it, by saying that the materials
of the tale cohere. What the tale is, we are not
going to relate here, ourselves, by any dry epi-
tome. Those who care to know, may learn it from
Mr Bellew himself through the medium of these
three volumes -- by the pertsal of which even
the most blase Novel-Reader, one who has
gone the round of the circulating libraries, may
count upon being continuously interested, and at
intervals nothing less than enthralled. If, upon
fitting occasions, Mr Bellew here no less willingly,
perchance, than when he is in the pulpit, under-
takes to point a moral, he does so unobetrusively.
He has evidently no inclination to have himself
classed among those domestic preachers whom be
himself flouts as preaching at their fellow-creatures
in all their moods and tempers, " inflicting morals
upon their laches, and erecting schoo.s of ethics out
of their good behaviour." A gallicism, by the way,
is always welcome to him in his choice of expres-
sions, as where he refers, as with a scornful
shrug of the shoulder, to " such gauche
bores as Eogliah travellers." Of his skill as a land-
scape painter—that is in the word-painting cf a
landscape—the following exquisite little descrip.
tion will (brief though it is) afford the reader ample
opportunity of judging;.._.
The mountain-stream, the Wage, is a tributary of the
Latino which fl )ws into the Irish Sea, Brawling among
the York,ihire moors, it at last reaches a narrow valley
overhung on either side by crags, that often lift themselves
perpendicularly out of thu river's bed, and among their
crevices give resting-place to tho ferns which there grow
luxuriantly. For some two or three miles the `Valle flows
between these steeps, rolling over huge boulders that seem
in some primeval age to have been precipitated from the
surrounding heights.
Then it forms small basins with recesses sheltered by
overhanging foliage, the ipecial admiration of Sir 'Nigel.