The Sun.
London, England, 1869-10-09 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The /car of Bullhampton. No. 4. By Anthony
Trollope.—We have a suspicion as to the plot of
this new serial story by one of the most popular of
our novelists. Our conjecture is that the seducer
of Carry Brattle will turn out to be no other than
—Captain Marrable. There is Lope consequently
for Squire Gilmore directly this damning fact shall
have been demonstrated. All may then come right

as to Harry Gilmore's love, and the heroine of the
book, before the tale is told, may become in fullness
of time the Mistress of the Privets. Already the
narrative is full of interest. The Vicar himself is
almost, we think, the most manly and the most
loveable of all the clerics created by Mr. Anthony
Trollope. Archdeacon Grantley is still the king
amongst them all, but the Vicar of Bullhampton is
to our mind, as we have said, the most manly and
the most loveable. The old miller, Brattle, again,
is admirably delineated.
Hilary St. Ives. By llarrison Ainsworth.
(New Monthly for October.)—Mrs. Sutton's mys-
terious history is told by herself in this instalment.
The reader has already had glimmerings of what it
is, scattered here and there incidentally through the
narrative. Sho is the mother of Hilary St. Ives.
She is the wife of Colonel Delamere. She has been
sinned against, but she has also, on her own show-
ing, very grievously sinned. Suspected of having
destroyed her mother, she is now proved to have
destroyed her father, though inadvertently. The
story is told with ease and vivacity. It is essentially
English in the character of its dranzatis persona,
and in the " setting" of the whole group in the
midst of a thoroughly English landscape. llarrison
Ainsworth, instead of having in any way run him-
self out, has still his old mastery over the atten-
tion of his reader.

Put I ourself in his Place. By Charles Reade.

(Cornhill for October).—The instalment for the
present month of this powerful and impassioned
fiction is one of the most remarkable that has yet
appeared. Little is captured in his Church-smithy,
after a desperate encounter with the infamous
emissaries or myrmidons of the trade--being just
snatched from otherwise inevitable death by the
Christmas mummers from the old Hall, led by the
Squire himself, Little's Uncle. Uncle and nephew
are thereby brought to each other's knowledge, and
before the number closes are happily reconciled.
The charming and thoroughly-womanly heroine is
in a breathless plight of bewilderment, having just
refused him immediately before the reconciliation
and the eclaircissement that leads to it. That ele-
gant scoundrel, Mr. Coventry, is, we rejoice to
know, however, in a still sorrier plight by far, and
one from which there is manifestly no chance for
him of extrication.

***Saveral contributions, more or less remarkable,
to the Byron Controversy, have recently made
their appearance.

1. There is Mr. Hotten's volumette of 189 pages,
recounting "The True Story of Lord and Lady
Byron," a little more veraciously than Mrs. Stowe
did in the September number of Macmillan—the
joint narrators, here, being Lord Macaulay,Thomas
Moore, Leigh Hunt, Thos. Campbell, the Countess
of Blessington, and the noble poet himself, through
his own poems, and through Captain Medwin's
record of their conversations together, especially in
regard to his marriage. As a frontispiece, we have
a grotesque copy from an original drawing by
Freeman, of Lady Byron, as she appeared in 1833
of itself a perfect justification of any estrangement
there might have been from her on the part
of Lord Byron. As an eccentric flyleaf, too,
we have a facsimile of a woodcut set forth
recently in a little catch-penny publication sold
in the streets the other day as the likeness of
Lord Byron's Half Sister, Augusta—the said /mod-
cut, however, being identified with one that has
already been issued in its time as the vera effigies
of the notorious Lola Montes, and of Madeline
Smith, the sensational murderess.

2. There is a little unbound booklet of 128 pages,
published by Thos. Cooper and Co., of Fleet-
street, and entitled " The Stowe-Byron Contro-
versy," compiled by the Editor of Once a Week,
purporting to contain what it certainly does not
(as our columns would testify very abundantly),
" a complete (7) resume of Public Opinion," [mean-
ing, of course, in the matter of that con-
troversy] together with "an impartial re-
view of the merits of the case"—a review
so impartial that it actually closes with that
shameful acceptance by the limes (according to
general belief, by the lion. Mrs. Norton in the
Times) of the whole of Mrs. Stowe's disgraceful
slander, an article which, four days after its appear-
ance in the leading journal on the Monday, the
limes, in a leader of the Friday following, took
especial care distinctly to repudiate. On that very
Monday, the 30th of August, we ourselves indig-
nantly scouted the whole narrative as a monstrous

libel on the part of Mrs. Stowe, through the pages
of Macmillan's :Magazine for September, follow-
ing up our demonstration of the fact in the lead-
ing columns of The Sun upon seven or eight subse-
quent occasions. Yet—though the first in the field,
and one of the most persistent afterwards—our
arguments are in no way referred to in this
complete résumé of Public Opinion in regard to
the so-called Stowe-Byron Controversy.
3. There is yet more recently published Mr.

Samuel Palmer's very acceptable brochure, in 112
pages, in which the reader will find " Byron
Painted by his Compeers," or, as we conceive it
ought rather to have been by his Contemporaries—
the constituent portions of the work being extracts
from the newspapers of the time about Lord
Byron's Marriage, his separation from his wife, his
exile, his illness, death, and burial ; the whole form-
ing a most curious and interesting compilation.

&aril tvi; ,A44Y,

LIER MAJESTY.

-.e.- __

BALMORAL CASTLE, Oct. 7.
The Queen, accompanied by Princess Beatrice,
walked out in the morning.

The Queen, accompanied by her Royal High-
Princess Louise, Princess Augustus and Princess
Amelie of Saxe-Coburg, drove out in the afier-

HOOD.