The Sun.
London, England, 1863-10-17 00:00:00

BAHIA, SEPT. 29.
Exchange on London 271. Sugar 2,000 to 2,500
reis. Cotton, 20,000 to 20,500 reis.

PERNAMBUCO, OCT. 1.
Exchange on London 271. Sugar, 2,500.
Browns, 1,800 to 1,000 reis, Cotton, 20,500 to
21,000 rein.

The Magdalena, with the outward mail of the
9th arrived here on the 29th inst.

...,...,m.......•

FRANCE.
"We announced some time ago," says the Patric,
" that negotiations were about to be entered on for
the conclusion of a treaty of commerce and naviga-
tion between France and Sweden, We now learn
that the Swedish plenipotentiaries—M A.Villerding
and Bernhoff—are expected in Paris, and that the
conferences will commence immediately."
BOURSE, Oct. 16.—The market continues in the
same inanimate state, without there being any
rumours, either political or otherwise, to account
tor it. The little business done shows a further de-
cline, Threes, for the Account, being now at 67f. 35c.
Mobilier have also receded, and Railway Shares are
heavy, and in some cases to ver. Toe market con-
tinued receding to the close, and left off as follows :
it per Cent 5....... 95 751 Italian Loa.
C
Do. end month.... Do. n• .... end month....
3 per Cents ...... 67 15 New ditto ........ 73 30
Do.
din di
obi molinth.... 67 25 Do. end month.... 73 30
Creer.... 1142 50 Russian ........ -
Do. end month
....1140 -- Austrian ....... 85
Bank Shares...... 3400 Spanish Threes....
Credit / oneier

ome Debt ......

" Eleanor's Victory" will more than sustain the
reputation already won for the author by her two
remarkable works—" Aurora Floyd " and "Lady
Audley's Secret." It will more than sustain Miss
Braddon's reputation, not by advancing it, but
rather, we would say, by purifying it. As a work
of:art the narrative here presented to us is—of course,
in no puritanical sense, yet, for all that, purely and
simply enough—unexceptionable. It is, throughout,
what the two earlier, and (we must confess) far
more enthralling fictions by which this literary
amazon won her spurs is the arena of romance—
right womanly ! We have nothing here to do any-
more with horse jockeys and dog fanciers. As we
traverse the new pathway along which
Miss Braddon now conducts us, guided,
as we advance along its most devious
windings, by the intricate and elastic, but tenacious
and wholly unbroken thread of her narrative, our
nostrils aro no longer offended (even occasionally)
by overpowering whiffs from the kennel and the
stable-yard—oppressed now by the close atmosphere
of the Lofty'a garret, now by the reeking fumes of
the low taproom or beershop—until the whole
webwork of the story, among the meshes of which
the siren whose cunning fingers have woven it
has contrived to entangle us, seems to have
become saturated with a strange inerradi-
cable flavour mysteriously compounded of rank
ammonia and stale tobacco. Such—who shall
deny it, that has ever read, or even looked into the
histories of either Lady Audley, or Aurora Floyd ?
—such literally is the general character of the air
Miss Braddon's readers have hitherto breathed, and
to which they were gradually becoming shamefully
accustomed, and were beginning almost—shocking,
though it may appear, to speak thus of our authoress's
more infatuated admirers—almost—to like ! A
different atmosphere altogether is breathed by the
readers of "Eleanor's Victory"—a different atmos-
phere is respired, in other words, by the imaginary
characters peopling the little world of this new and
most romantic narrative. The scene of the story
here related lies for the most part in the green,
fresh, wholesome country side, among the fields and
woods of old England, hard by the royal town of
Windsor—either at Woodlands, the seat 'of old
Maurice de Crespigny, or at Tolldale Priory,
the estate of Mr. Gilbert Monckton,, the wealthy
London solicitor. The incidents of the fiction,
it is true, carry us as well alternately to
Paris or to London—conducting the reader when
in Paris mostly to the gaslight boulevards,
and when in London to the homely purlieus of the
little back street, or cud de sac, here spoken of as
the Pilasters in the Cockney regions of Bloomsbury.
Eleanor—Vane by birth, Monckton by marriage—
is, as the title at once indicates, the heroine. The
Victory that title specifies is the one achieved by her
at the very close of the fiction, not over her foe,but over
her own passionate yearning for vengeance. In all
three of Miss Braddon's principal fictions, the heroine
occupies the central position in the picture—predo-
minates, so to speak, far and away over the hero:
whether the good or the bad, whether the bluff
Yorkshire squire, or the handsome horse-train-
ing adventurer—whether, as in the present
instance, Mr, Monckton, the attorney, or
Launcelot Darrell, the gambling, swindling,
forging, fribbling Ne'er-do-weel. In all three of
these stories again—there is a Secret. Lady Audley
has her Secret. Aurora Floyd has her Secret.
Eleanor Vane has her Secret. Only, in the last
mentioned instance, the secret is held aloof, not
from the reader, but solely from the heroine's friends
and foes—save one, the dearest, and truest, and
manliest of all her friends, Richard Thornton (Dick
Thornton, we should rather call him), the scene
painter. It is in the Pilasters that Dick has his
habitat, smokes his bull-dog meershaum, lounges
about in his shirt-sleeves or his pigment-stained
working coat, the kindliest of good-natured fellows,
loving in his heart's core (unacknowledged to any-
body but himself) grey-eyed, amber-haired Eleanor
Vane (who is not for him, however), and cherishing,
as only such a model nephew can, the worthy,
homely, kind-hearted Signora Picirillo. We don't
quite know but what we have a sneaking
preference for the untidy ways and sordid sur-
roundings of the Signora's menage at the
Bloomsbury Pilasters, to all the luxurious comfort
and splendours of Tolldale Priory, with its ancient
rooms and its modern furniture, its costly paintings
and its parian statuettes. The battle all through—
though long delayed—is to be (the reader sees
it soon enough, and waits for it eagerly when
once he has seen thus that is to be)—between
Eleanor and Launcelot ! Between the good•looking
young, idling, scoundrel, who lures old George
Vane, Eleanor's father, to his ruin et one of the
Paris gambling-tables, and through that ruin goads
him to a ghastly suicide in the grey of an autumn
morning. The plot; of the story here told is
for the most part wonderfully ingenious. Only
one flaw in it as a plot—namely, one aris-
ing out of a needless violation of the
probabilities—can we point to. That flaw, to our
thinking, is one that might readily enough
have
been avoided by so skilful a romancist as the
author of " Aurora Floyd," being the unnatural
suddenness with which Eleanor slips into an
engagement as travelling companion to the
very woman by whom Eleanor's own husband, Mr.
Monckton, had years before been jilted. As we
read the chapter recounting the manner in which
this astoundingly wonderful coincidence is brought
about—the chapter where the fugitive wife, just
after her flight from Tolldale Priory is showing off
her brilliant powers as a pianist to the professional
negotiator of these engagements,the Principal, that
is, of the Governess's Institution—we hear the
whistle of the scene-shifter ; we see the ungainly
sliding-flap sticking at an angle all askew in the
ill-adjusted groove; we smell the orange-peel, and
the sawdust; all is tinsel and cotton velvet, rouge
and spangles. Otherwise than in this exceptional
instance, we are carried onward in the narrative
under the agreeable influence of a complete illusion.
Nevertheless, there are one or two inconceivable
idiots, at times quite distressingly prominent, among
the dramatis personce. Little blue eyed Laura
Mason, for example, with her prattling talk and
her everlasting simper, is—alas ! that we should
have to say it of a pretty girl in a love story—a
perfect ass. One hardly has patience at times to
glance with half an eye down the pages rendered
frivolous by her nonsensical small talk—very small
talk. Her mother, Mrs. Major Lennard, is nearly
as great an idiot, when we come unhappily towards
the end of the story, to make her acquaintance.
But her empty headed husband, the Major, com-
pensates the reader for the drivelling foolishness
of his pretty wife and daughter, by .an opportune
kind heartedness and a blunt common-sense that
make us forget even his own crass stupidity
when not under emergencies! What possibly can
be said, however, of our respect for the sound judg-
ment and the good taste of the clever London
lawyer, who has made such an egregious nincom-
poop of himself as to fall desperately in lore with
so very shallow a creature as that pretty
Margurei
with the yellow hair and the torquoise eyes, even-
tually the wife of Major Lennard, and, as such, the
mother of Laura the beloved of Launcelot ? Al.
respect for Mr. Monckton's taste and judg-
ment pass away from us for ever—so soon
as we drop into the acquaintance of the Lennards
and come to appreciate the character of that same
Margaret. That Eleanor's Victory will obtain the
popularity of " Lady Audley's Secret" and " Arrow
Floyd," we cannot believe for an instant. The story,