The Sun.
London, England, 1862-07-26 00:00:00

_LITERATURE.

...,.
Prue to the .Last. A Novel. By Mrs. Gordon
Smythies. 3 vols. Hurst and Blackett.
The accomplished lady who is the authoress of
this sparking novel, "Tue to the Lase—and of
how many other popular works of iinasination '—
must certainly be allowed to have long since taken.
herplace among the most volumiinous of those writers
whose aim it is to cater to thyemonocent amusement
of our age. Since the anon
work"—Cousin
of
what was literally her " maiden us
o firstus'n
author's
Goo/Trey having won its fair young
fame while she was yet in her girlhood (as Rs Burney had done towards the end of the last cuennY
tury by her maiden work Evelina)—the writer of
" Cousin Geoffrey" has been as indefatigable as she
is apparently inexhaustible. By this time, we I
take it, she must have written a pretty tolerable
library. Fashionable novels, love stories, romances,
Christmas tales, serials issued weekly in illustrated
periodicals sold by tens of thousands ! Fictions
like the present in the old legitimate three volumes
octas-a—less elaborated plots in two volumes---
others of a more compact and simple character in
one, complete in itself ! Season after season Mrs.
Gordon Smythies has been ready with her contri-
bution, more frequently with her contributions, to
the circulating libraries. Season after season at
intervals—more particularly of late years—she has
poured forth her serial imaginings through the
medium of those provincial newsmen who are to
the English multitude what the colporteurs are to
the French. One of the most successful productions
in this way—.diffused far and wide throughout the
United Kingdom as, for a long while, the chief
attraction of one of the most widely circulated of our
penny illustrated periodicals—was it not " Hope
Evermore" in Cassell's Journal?—won for itself
(before its completion) the distinguished honour of
being commended in a speech delivered by Lord
Brougham! Without doubt, poor Theodore Hook
—had he survived until now—would have been
proud of his fair young protegee. For it was under
his editorship (as annoaneed upon its first title
Pugs) that " Cousin Geoffrey" was originally
published, While that vivacious narrative
was the Alpha, the work now lying before
us for our notice—as the new Novel of the
Season " True to the Last" (as the authoress
is to her own calling !)—is the Omega (as
yet) of Mrs. Gordon Smythies' productions. For
the sake of the " Alpha" alone, this "Omega"
(for the time being) would have been not
unwelcome. But together with the remembrance
of its claims, comes the recollection of those of all
the witnessing letters in this graceful illumination
by Mrs. Smythies of a very Alphabet of Fiction.
" True to the Last" is true to the time in which it
appears. It is, in some respects, essentially a Sen-
sation Novel. As a story it does not begin so much
ab initio, after the old humdrum fashion (so long
since become questionably fashionable), as it plunges
with the true Horatian impetuosity ?n medias res.
The sensational character of the work is indicated I
plainly enough at the very outset. Quite as un-
mistakeably as though it had been by the famous
" header" of the Colleen Dawn, or by the " bridge
scene" of the Savourneen Deelish, or by the " ghost
scene" and the apparition in the Corsican Brother*.
Scarcely has the reader got fairly into the first
chapter when he becomes aware of events as sur-
prising as—let us say—the following : a Terrific
Railway Accident that has swept out of existence
" at one fell swoop" the whole of the elder branch
of a noble house (Lord Cumbercourt), his lordship's
brother-in-law, Wilfred de Mowbray, and his two
promising young sons, the elder of them of
course heir to the title and estates ! By reason
of which wholesale catastrophe the head of the
younger branch of the house, a common-place
Government clerk, is as suddenly transformed
into the Earl of Cumbercourt, with an income

—not of a few hundred a-year but—of £30,000
sterling ! Having a town mansion in Park- lane—
an exquisite little villa on the banks of the Thames
at Twickenham—a Hall in Berkshire,—a Park in
Wales—and a Castle in Scotland ! Pretty well
—all this—to be shunted into by a railway casu-
alty. A glimmering notion of the plot that grows
out of this initiatory crash may be afforded by a
very few words of explanation. Immediately prior
to the Accident we have just mentioned, the only
child (e daughter) of the then Government clerk,
while staying in the country with an aunt (Mrs.
Mervyn) at a pretty little sea-beaten village (Rock
ness),falls in love with, and not only falls in love with,
but becomes summarily affianced to a young ensign in
a marching regiment. Shortly before that same Rail-
way Collision has metamorphosed Mr. De Mowbray,
of her Majesty's Civil Service, into the Right Hon.
the Earl of Cumbercourt, he himself being a
widower, has not only become inopportunely affi
anted, to like his daughter, but has actually taken to
wife, the fat, and intensely vulgar widow of a well-
to-do fish salesman, one Mrs Chubb, nee Lobskin,
a stout middle-aged person with £4OO a-year, and
no H's ! The Fish Salesman's Widow, Mrs. Chubb
that was, Miss Lobskin that had been, upon rising
from the comparative dignity of Mrs. De Mowbray
to the superlative dignity of the Countess of Cum-
bercourt—furnishes, together with her whole family
of the Lobskins, pare etfils, oncle et nevue, the "low
comedy "of the plot. " The Countess" is an exag-
gerated specimen of the parvenu peeress, as repre-
sented in " Countess —" (the milliner that had
been), whose patronising manners so tickled the
sense of humour of the fastidious Pelham—how
many years ago! Exactly one whole generation
ago, five-and•thirty years ago, at the Ball in the
Assembly Rooms at Cheltenham. Whatever
Moliere's " Medeein malgre lui," that comical
vagabond Sganarelle may have done with our
human anatomy—transposing the liver and heart,
placing the cceur at the droit and the foie at the
gauche, in the deportment of theparvenu as seen in
1827, and again in 1862, one can recognise no very
appreciable difference. We can scarcely venture,
at any rate, to assert with the mock-physician's
sublime confidence " nous avons change tout cela !"
As either of these countesses—Pelham, by the
wickedly calls his the " counter-countess" (and
the phrase is applicable to both these stout
ladies)—as either of these countesses might
say of themselves, though separated from each
other by the distance of a whole genera-
tion, they were really " much of a muchness."
Turning, however, from the low-comedy characters
to the romantic lover-class of characters in "True ,
to the Last"—what might we not say of that by
comparison ? Why that it is when contrasted with
the set just particularised as the creme de la creme
might be to the sky blue ! Fancy the loveliest of
heroines, with the name of Adela de Mowbray—of i
the Lady Adele de Mowbray ! Loving and beloved i
by a delightful dark-eyed young hero—an officer in 1
the English army—one Claude Temple ! The Lady
Adela has a charming little blue-eyed blonde as her
confidante, a "sister coz," christened Isabella, but
familiarly known as Bluebell. She, in her
turnt,
loves, but at the outset is not beloved by the
dazzling colonel of Claude's regiment
,TColonel Tre-
velyan, the Hon. Jaspar TrevelyanlThan all this
what could any one reasonabl •
material" to be worked y wish as the " raw
Gordon Smy thies'
y known up' according to Mrs.
love stor of "W- skill in the art, inatoya.
a-d
thing should be thoughtOr to be still at
wanayntriantoe, if any-
that that end— voici ! It is here 1 in the villain of the
t
ale--a malignant, scoundrelly, one-eyed attorney,
Vipont Crawley by name —a creature with a hor-
ribly mutilated right hand, a lean brown hand,
before the
from which (long
story opens) the first
and second fingers have been cut off at the roots by
a dinner knife ! Vipont Crawley—the very name
for such a wretch ! It being an odd circumstance,r
C
however, by the way, that
with our seems
novelists.
Who
a pet name for the villaidoes not rememberns
wth
rawleys of Vanity Fair,
as traced out upon his the C
enduring tablets by Mr.
Thaekeray—with point
of a scalpel, and then
deliberatively bainto the metal with aquafortis ?
Who again
that has ever read the "Florence Macar-
thy"of Lady Morganwill ever lose the recollection
of the ~Crawley" in that powerful narrative. Here
is the latest son of the race—Vipont Crawley,
unmistakeably of the same stock, and not a
degenerate specimen in his way ! A viper-like
' crawling way, it is, as his very name seems to indi-
cate. As to the intricacies of the plot of the story, asl
'first of all ingeniously and apparently inextri-