The Sun.
London, England, 1863-07-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Ring of Amasis. From the papers of a
German Physiciau. Edited by Owen Meredith.
2 vole. Chapman and Hall.
Owen Meredith has the soul of a poet. There is
passion and there is power in the conception of his
work, but he does himself grievous injustice in its
execution. During the last ten years a sad fata-
lity has befallen the world of literature. Our Poets
and our Novelists, not content, like the great masters
of the art who had preceded them, with Truth and
Nature, with sentiment and Simplicity, have made
choice of the Sensational and the Strange for the
subjects of their stories, and have mistaken rhap-
sody and incoherence for eloquence. When Bon
Gualtier brought forward kis spasmodic tragedy,
we could afford to laugh. The extravagance of
" Firmillian" was a legitimate subject for our ridi•
cule ; but with very different feelings do we witness
the self-immolation of some of the most promising
writers of our day—

" Who but would laugh if such a man There be,
Who but must weep if Atticus were he."
As an example of this extravagant and rhapsodical
style let anyone take up the first volume of this
" Ring of Amasis," and opening it at random,
what will he infer from passages like the fol-
lowing :

And when the priest . . . our union, did I
not see in hers . . . that froze the marrow of
my bones ? . . . She herself, had she not
seen it sparkle ? And then . , • . the
frightful secret suppressed for years with the force of a
giant, and endured with the fortitude of a martyr . .

. . in a moment of mad delirium I Ay, from the I
lips of fever and burning breath of hell streamed into her
heart, and seared all pity in it, and hardened it for ever I
. • • . for ever I
Such strivings after effect have no real power to
produce sensation. They are like the turnip-head
and the sheet, which even fail to frighten children.
No real spirits are conjured thus. And yet if the
bewildered reader, or rather beholder, of pages like
this passage, throws down the volume in despair,
he will do wrong. He will lose much. Side by
side with these fantastic flourishes, strangely alter-
nate sound sober sense, and homely wit, and wisdom ;
while, as for sensational effect, there is a scene in
the second volume, a panorama of a river floating
by, and two figures in agony of life or death, that
will long haunt the memory of the readers of this
romance. It is because we so heartily appreciate
and because we so cordially admire this power at d
this capacity of the author of "The Ring of Amasis,"
that we are indignant with him for his injustice to
his own gifts. " Like one in whom two natures are
contending," he is alternately swayed by Truth and
Affectation , now inspired by genuine feeling, aid now
carried away by an effort after effect. A great por-
tion of the machinery of this tale is clumsy and
wholly unnecessary. The introduction about the
legend of the Loreley, extravagant in itself, is quite
out of character with the details of the story when
these details are revealed to us. The story
itself, however, when its human interest can be
disentangled from the maze of mysticism that
enfolds it, is full of pathos and full of power.
Count Edmond R-- and his brother Felix,
and their young foster sister Juliet, grow up
together in a happy German chateau. Then
Felix, gay and thoughtless, goes to the wars,
and Edmond, sedate and serious, departs on his
travels. In his researches in Egypt the latter learns
the secret history of Amasis and Sethos, the sons
of Thoitaris, the King. Amasis, the younger son,
having discovered the interpretation of a talismanic
ring, his father leaves to him the kingdom. " Dis-
turb not the hand of destiny. Touch not with
earthly finger the hand of fate." So Amasis read
the writing, and Sethos obeyed it to the letter
when, some time after, his brother, the King, who
had supplanted him, met his death by drowning,
Sethos stretched not forth his hand to interfere with
fate ! This legend makes a deep impression upon the
visionary Count Edmond, who takes possession of
the ring from the finger of the mummy. On his
return home, the fair, light-hearted Juliet seizes upon
the ring, and declares that it shall be her ring of
betrothal when her time arrives. Ultimately she
is engaged to Felix, and she gives him the myste-
rious ring. Meanwhile a powerful passion has been
developing itself in the breast of the visionary
Edmond. From all save the eyes of his mother
Edmond conceals his love and his despair. A brief
while after the betrothal the brothers are together
in a boat, and an incautious movement of the im-
petuous Felix realises the legend of the Egyptian
brothers—

" Against the whirling water he beat, fast and weak, with
desperate arms. His soaked clothes and heavy boots were
dragging him down. The light boat glided on.
" Suffocating and exhausted, he gasped, ' Enough, Ed-
mond ! For Heaven's sake, enough lam sufficiently
punished. My strength gives way. lam sinking. I can
no more.'

" . . Cold as the spectre of his own thought, erect,
unmoved, immoveable, with folded arms he stood, and
looked.

" Looked on his drowning brother.
"Then, into the eyes, and over the face, of Felix there
came an undefinable terror.
"It was not the terror of death. It was not the vague
alarm of a drowning man.
" He had undetstood the face of his brother, Edmond.
"He had read in that face the meaning of a thought
which sufficed in a second of time to congeal with horror
the essence of his soul.
" And Felix shuddered.
" So the angels must shudder when they gaze into the
depths of Hell.
" With a voice that was the death shriek of man's faith
in man, he cried, Edmond I Edmond
"It was the sad receding message from a world of love
submerged.
" side by side, the fleeting river bore them on, those
brothers.
" The one safe, unmoved, erect.
"The other, convulsively struggling with baffled and
broken efforts amidst the thousand curling, cold, and silvery
meshes of that liquid loom of death.
" Side by side, the river bore them onwards yet, Side

by side, eye fixed on eye, with speechless lips and speaking
looks.

"A dreadful inutterable dialogue was passing then be-
tween the eyes of those two brotaers, They understood
each other."

The situation is powerfully conceived and moat
vigorously depicted. We had intended to say
more of the admirable working out of the
moral, but we forbear rather than betray the
secrets, of what is, at first, an over-complicated,
but eventually a wholly enthralling plot. Over any
minuter analysis of the work, however, than
has been here attempted, we are in no way
whatever disposed to loiter. From the gifted
hand of Owen Meredith, we look for far
nobler and worthier manifestations of a genius
that, to a very great extent, appears in some
sort to be hereditary. While sexing this, how-
ever, we would add that the originality marking
many of its loftier attributes is unquestionable.
The hand of Owen Meredith, howbeit, will wield
the pen, we doubt not, more freely and far more
effectively, :now that by itlae completion of these
dreamings in an unwholesome atmosphere—it is
lightened of the perillous weight of this balefully
glittering Ring of Amasis.

A Manual of Popular Physiology. By Henry
Lawson, M.D. One vol. pp. 168. Hardwicke.
When we can say, as we do, that Dr. Lawson's
"Manual of Popular Physiology" is worthy of a
place upon the same shelf on which
already stand Dr. Andrew Combe's well-known
treatise upon the same subject, Mr. Lewes's
two larger and more philosophic volumes upon a
kindred theme, and that charming little anonymous
book called "The House I Live In," we have
spoken in high praise, indeed, of the work
now under consideration. It is deserving
of this praise, however, if only by reason
of the exceeding simplicity of its general
arrangement. The outlines of the subjects here
sketched, as those selected fnr delineation, are well
drawn: but, more than that, they are well filled
in, so to speak, with an easy but bold and delicate
pencilling. What Dr. Lawson has here at-
tempted to do in this book is, as he himself
tells his reader, nothing more and nothing less than
to explain the Science of Life in untechnical lan-
guage. The text of the work throughout, there-
fore, is singularly familiar, is, we might almost say,
from the first page to the last, purely conversational.
And the descriptions given, in themselves remark-
able for their lncidity, are rendered yet more in-
stantly comprehensible to the unlearned, or, as we
may say, unprofessional student, by a great variety
of cleverly-executed woodcut illustrations
scattered about the pages among the letter-
press. One habit the author has, unhappily,
dropped into, in common with so many
other writers of nowadays—the profuse in-
dulgence here and there of extravagant peri-
phrases, evidently under the mistaken idea that
it has about it something irresistibly humourous.
For example, in this very preface, instead
of saying, in so many plain and compre-
hensible words, " Give a dog a bad name
and hang him" (he wants, in the passage referred to,
quite incidentally to make some passing allusion to
the old saying) Dr. Lawson insinuates a hint at the
proverb he has, at the moment of writing, in his
mind's eye, he insinuates a delicate hint at it by this
astounding display of circumlocution ! " There is
an old and familiar proverb," he says (and so
far so good, but then—listen!) "regarding the stran-
gulation of that number of the canine genus which
has through some mischance been deprived of its fair
reputation." And so forth—the whole of this same,
unhappily but too frequent, twist or trick in writing,
being clearly a mistake the most eggregious on the
part of our otherwise highly meritorious author, the
writer of this " Manual of Popular Physiology."
If Dr. Lawson would but take our hint in good
part, he would carefully eliminate passages of this
faulty kind from any future editions of a work that,
really and truly, to our mind, is deserving of being
very frequently reprinted. He would do this for
certain if he would but take our word—here very
confidently whispered by us in a sort of stage
" aside "—that the fault of style alluded to is to the
last degree tedious and intolerable, instead of being
in any way humorous or exhiliarating.