The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-26 00:00:00

SHIPPING—This Day.

LONDON, Sept. 2G.—Wind this day at noon—South-
Weat ; moderate breeze, and cloudy weather.
TORBAY, Sept. 24.—Arrived—Banama, screw steamer,
and left 2bth for China.

CARDIFF,Sept. 25.—Sailed—Sagittarius, for St. Thomas;
Majestic, for Nassau.
SWANSEA, Sept. 24.—Wind S.W.—Arrived—Cubans,
from Caldera. Sailed—Fearlss, for Mauritius.
CLYDE, Sept. 25.—Wind S.W.—Arrived—Moultan,
from Africa.

IsY ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.

PLYMOUTH, Saturday Morning.

The screw steam corvette Racoon, 22, Captain Count
Victor Glichen, from Portsmouth, arrived in the Sound
early this morning.

BY MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.

GRAVESEND, Saturday Morning.

Arrived, Sept. 25—Prince Consort, from Bombay ; Alice,
from Guernsey ; Selecia, from Calcutta ; Ellen, from
Guernsey; Harfruen, from Nyland; Willie Ridley, from
Manzanilla ; steamer Brabo, from Iquique.
DEAL, Saturday Morning.

Passed—Helen, from Afica, and Gladiator, from Colombo,
both for London; Duke of Wellington, for Goole; Mag-
nolia, for Belize; Countess of -Yarborough, for Cardiff;
Lincolnshire, for Pert Philip—all from Lisbon ; Earl, from
Antwerp, for Cardiff.
The Joseph Straker, screw steamer, from Dieppe for
Hartlepool, has been in collision during the night with a
bark, abandoned. and crew landed here. Further particu-
lars next telegraph.

CONNUBIAL LONDON.—WhiIe only 164 persons
out of 10,000 marry every year in the whole country, 268
marry in the City.

Mr. W. V. HARCOURT, the author of the "Letters
of Historicus," which appeared originally in the limes,
has in the press " Leading Cases of International Law,
with a Commentary," which will shortly be published by
Messrs. Macmillan and Co.

" AURORA FLOYD" has been translated into Ger-
man by F. Seybold, and published at Leipzig.
Mr. GEORGE PEABODY is said to have presented
a geological cabinet of the value of £25,000 to Yale College
Loss OF LIFE IN THE RlVER.—Yesterday after-
noon an accident Occurred, resulting in the loss of
two lives. A Greenwich steam-vessel had just left the
Tunnel pier when a small boat, containing three men, went
close under its bow. The captain immediately reversed the
engines, but the small boat was apparently unmanageable,
and getting close to the starboard paddlewheel, was upset.
Every assistance was rendered, but two of the men were
unfortunately drowned. The bodies have been recovered,
and await an inquest.
A BRIDE AND BRIDEGROOM IN A FIX.—On
Monday morning last a young man in the employ-
ment of Messrs. Pile, Spence, and Co., West Hartlepool,
led to the altar a young woman, a daughter of Air,
M'Millan, of her Majesty's Customs, West Hartlepool,
The parents of the girl were averse to the wedding, and
bad used every means in their power to prevent its con-
summation. The bridegroom was not to be frustrated,
however. The necessary arrangements were made, and
it appears the young man had consumed all his cash, for
he had to borrow a wedding ring before the nuptial
knot could be tied—which was effected in as secret a
manner as possible. Having managed so cleverly to
gain the object of his heart, he was determined to celebrate
the happy event by a general invitation among friends to
partake of the " social cup" and its varied accompaniments.
The question that naturally at once suggested itself was,
" how to raise the wind" to provide this festive entertain-
ment, and a watch which the husband had in his
possession was handed to his better half, by whom it
was taken to Mr. Tweddle's, Pawnbroker, Hartle-
pool, to obtain a sovereign on it, Mr. Tweddle per-
ceived the watch was one that he had information of as
having been stolen, and a borough policeman quickly had
the bride elect taken to the lock-up. She told the officer
her newly-made husband had given her it, and when the
guests were preparing to participate in the nuptial festivi-
ties, one of the county policemen apprehended the "happy
man," and placed him in a cell at West Hartlepool
police-
station, where he involuntarily passed the night, and was
yesterday (Tuesday) brought before the bench, charged
with having in his possession a watch belonging to Thomas
Cragg, master mariner, Stockton, who had it stolen from
his person in V ietoria-terrace, 'West Hartlepool on the 25th
of August last. The plismer was remanded until Satur-
day for the production of the owner of the watch.—Aets •
castle Chronicle.

EXTRAORDINARY CHARGE.—A singular allega-
tion of conspiracy was preferred agaiLizt three
Dewsbury gentlemen, before the Huddersfield magistrates,
on Wednesday last. The defendants were charged with
agreeing to accept £5O from a man named Booth, on condi-
tion that a charge of felony brought against him should be
compromised. He afterwards denied the felony, and de-
clared that the money was extorted from him under the
threat of a criminal prosecution. After hearing the evi-
dence, one of the defendants (Dr. Thornton) was discharged,
but the other two, an auctioneer and a town concillor, were
committed for trial at the assizes, being released in the
useantime on bail, The case against Booth stood over:

Remarkable though the success at once achieved
by Miss Braddon's first work, that is to say, her
first work of any importance, "Lady Audley's
Secret," its successor speedily attained for itself a
yet wider popularity. Nor can this be very well
won dered at upon a comparison—no matter how cur-
sory—of those two romantic narratives. The extra-
ordinary capacity possessed by our authoress for
fixing the attention of her readers, for awakening
and sustaining their curiosity, for enthralling their
interest, for mastering their sympathies, not inter-
mittently, but continuously, by a sort of glamour,
from the first page to the last, from the instant her
story commences down to the very moment of its
completion—agreeably noticeable in the instance of
"Lady Audley's Secret," was pre-eminently so in
that of" Aurora Floyd." The mainspring of each
plot was, in a manner, so to speak, curiously similar
—almost, as one might say, identical. Although
the circumstance was not again frankly announced
upon the second title page, Aurora Floyd had her
Secret no less than Lady Audley herself. But the
Secret of Aurora was better preserved, was more
artful in its concealment, was less ghastly of its
kind—more lamentable, less criminal. Something
morbid these is, no doubt, in each tale, affecting the
imagination as we read on, almost at times as if we
were breathing an unwholesome atmosphere. By
a strange monotony of contrivance on the part of
the authoress in building up the machinery of her
second plot, the root idea of it, is so far like that of
the first, that it has to do with Bigamy. While Lady
Audley, however, is to our mind simply repulsive
throughout, a wicked, sly, coo;-bsained, iron-handed
Lucretia-Briuvilliers in little, with her Lamia-like
halo of golden hair, her Becky Sharp-like blueness
of eye, and her Madame Lafarge-like deliberation
in sweeping out of existence, as though he were
some mere troublesome gnat rather than a "fellow
human," a husband who happened to be in her way
—Aurora Floyd is, on the contrary, often wonder-
fully attractive, occasionally nothing less than
bewitching, in spite of her wild, bold, sometimes all
but masculine impulsiveness. The reader—hardly
less, first of all, than handsome Talbot Bulstrode, or
than afterwards good, gentle-hearted John Mellish
—falls in love with her, in very despite of her
Secret, of her unladylike predilection for Bell's
Life, of her intimate knowledge of turf slang,
of her wielding so fiercely that pretty, stinging,
snake-like, jewelled riding-whip of her's over the
deformed shoulders of yonder wretched pale-faced
lameter, Steeve Hargraves, the Softy ! In defiance
of all which, the reader is fain at times to stumble no
less completely than does the proud heir to the Cor-
nish baronetcy, the fastidious Talbot himself, into
the pitfalls of her eyes, and to get entangled no less
inextricably than honest John in the meshy network
of her blue-black hair ! And no marvel, either,
that so strange a heroine as this should exercise so
peculiar a fascination. Does not our authoress her-
self say of her, through the lips of Talbot Bulstrode
—" She is like Mrs. Nesbitt in the zenith of her
fame and beauty ; she is like Cleopatra sailing
down the Cydnus ; she is like Nell Gwynne selling
oranges ; she is like Lola Montes giving battle
to the Bavarian students; she is like Charlotte
Corday with the knife in her hand, standing behind
the friend of the people in his bath ; sie is like
everything that is beautiful and strange, and
wicked, and unwomanly, and bewitching." She
—this impulsive, terrible, captivating Aurora, for the
loss of whom as a wife that same Talbot Bulstrode,
tate Captain of the Eleventh Hussars, haughty as a
Hidalgo, daring as (what he was) one of the cavalry
heroes of the famous Charge at Balaklava, sobs
aloud in an agony of despairing pride behind his cold
clasped hands! Of whom, as he weeps, our authoress
says so exquisitely, " Do not despise him for those
drops of anguish : they were the virgin tears of his
manhood. Never since infancy had his eyes been wet
before. God forbid that such tears as those should
be shed more than once in a lifetime ! The agony
of that moment was not to be lived through twice.
The hoarse sobs rent and tore his breast as if his
flesh had been hacked by a rusty sword ; and when
he took his wet hands from his face, he wondered
that they were not red; fur it seemed to him as if he
had been weeping blood." It is a woman who can
write thus powerfully and tenderly who has peanud
this enthralling story of "Aurora Floyd"—it is of a
heroine who can be thus wept for that she writes !
No marvel is it to us that the book has won for itself
so wide a popularity. Whether it is a popularity
that will be lasting is another matter altogether.
But, for seizing upon the attention, for taking cap-
tive the imagination of her contemporaries, the
genius of Miss Braddon as a story-teller is indis-
putably great. It is purely and entirely as a
story teller, as the inventor of a plot, as the nar-
rator of a fictitious series of events, a linked
chain not of " sweetness" but of terrors and
wonders and mysteries long " drawn out," that
Miss Braddon, among our romancists, extorts
from us, while we read her—at first our un-
questioning, but at last (we cannot but con-
fess it) our reluctant—admiration. Reluctant
we have said, and for this simple reason, that we
make acknowledgment of our admiring these stories
of Miss Braddon as we might make confession of a
predilection for bang or opium ! The atmcsphere
we seem to breathe while wandering through the
ghostland of" Aurora Floyd" or "Lady Audley" we
cannot, it is true, venture to pronounce distinctly
pernicious; but we must in candour admit that
it appears to us decidedly unwholesome of
its kind. Yet, while quaffing the literary
bang poured out for us by this Syren,
we can't, for the life of us, help smacking
our lips over it. While masticating these delicate
morsels of intellectual opium, we are gazing upon
scenes and creations only to be gazed upon i❑
Dreamland. The popular edition of " Aurora
Floyd," here published as a companion volume to a
similar issue of "Lady Audley's Secret," will ope❑
a yet wider field to the already extended popularity
of a work which, in spite of, so to speak, its deleteri-
ous flavour, is still undoubtedly replete with fasci-
nation.