The Sun.
London, England, 1866-08-20 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, AUGUST 20, 1866.

ante of the New Zealanders, there is no lack of
stout hearts and strong hands to repel an enemy
from any of the colonies.
The general condition of Victoria is prosperous.
The new Land Act has, as the Governor remarked,
produced most beneficial effects, and the plains are
alive with ploughmen breaking up the land. In com-
mercial circles, too, there is as much activity as
in the agricultural world, and the spirit of
speculation so busy in the old world has been
stirring up the enterprising spirits of the southern
regions. There is much talk about establishing
woollen factories in Victoria, and they have every
prospect of success, seeing that they have abund-
ance of the finest material close at hand. It is only
surprising that something of the sort should not have
been earlier attempted. Other more adventurous
and less substantial schemes are afloat for manu-
facturing salt from sea water, for making paper
from the bark tree, &c. Altogether the young
country is full of vigorous life, and affords a grati-
fying example of Anglo-Saxon energy.

LATEST INTELLIGENCE.

ITALY.

FLORENCE, Aug. 20.

A Royal decree has been issued appointing Prince
Humbert Honorary President of the Italian Com-
mission of the Paris Exhibition.

Baron de Blalaret, the French Minister, is also
among the members of the Commission.

FRANCE.

PARIS, August 20.

The Emperor paid a visit yesterday to the Em-
press of Mexico at the Grand Hotel. He was
cheered by the crowd on his return to Saint Cloud.
His Majesty afterwards walked on foot in the Bois
de Boulogne.

PARIS, Aug. 18.--Two o'clock.—Although busi-
ness continues to be very dull, some few demands
have had the effect not only of sustaining the slight
advance of yesterday, but even of increasing it.
French Threes were done at 69f., or 21c. higher ;
Italian Fives at 52f. 60c., or a rise of 10c. Credit
Mobilier were unchanged at 646 f. 25c. ; Credit
Foncier at 1,302 f. 50c., or an improvement of 2f.
50c. Comptoir d'Escompte were likewise unaltered
at 872 f. 50c. The Railway Market remains very
inactive.

Three o'clock.—The market has closed as fo]

lows :

4 per Cents 9B 10
Do. end month —
3 per Cents. 69 10
Do. end month 69 10
Credit Mobilier
Do. end month
Credit Fonder 1297 50
Do. end month 1302 • 50
RAIL'

Bank Shares 3550
Italian Loan 52
Do. end month 52
Mexican Loan 2B
Do. Bonds 172
Spanish Threes
Home Debt —
Deferred
WAYS.

For Account.
871 25

Orleans

Northern 1135
Lyons and Mediterranean........., B7l 25
Southern 530
Western —
Eastern 532 50
Sardinian .
Austrian
Lombard
North of Spain.....
Saragossa
Ditto to Barcelona..
Roman.

352 50
386 25

125 -

THE AUSTRIAN FLEET.

- -o-

(From the Military Correspondent of the Times.)

GO
65
50
50

TRIESTE, Aug. 13.
Admiral Tegethoff has opened the eyes of the
Austrian nation to the fact that they have a fleet,
and no despicable fleet either, though they have been
governed by the War Department since their sailor
Archduke left them to become an Emperor. The
Archduke Max, as the officers and sailors of the
navy still affectionately call him, is deeply regretted,
and is spoken of in the warmest terms. He seems
to have made the Austrian sea service, and his
energy and influence at Vienna are much missed.
The dockyards and arsenal at Pola are all the crea-
tions of his energetic administration, and it will be
long before the Austrian navy finds so distinguished
a friend. But the gods help those who help them-
selves, and it will not be the fault of the navy if it
sinks again into obscurity. The officers say that if
they appear in uniform in the streets of Vienna they
are stared at, and people ask them what nation they
belong to. Will Austria become a seafaring and
commercial people now that she has resigned her
influence in Germany ? Sanguine. believers in her
future destiny say " Yes ;" but where is her coast
line—where are her portsi and, above all, where is
_ _

LITERATURE.

Library Edition of Miss Braddon,g Novels.
The Trail of the Serpent. One Vol. pp. 456. Sir
Jasper's Tenant. One Vol. pp. 457. Novels
by M. E. Braddon. Ward, Lock, and Tyler.
As a popular novelist, Miss Braddon is in a
manner entitled to have her works issued in .a
Library Edition—for, already, she has, within these
last few years, with her own hand, written a small
library of fiction. As originally issued in the re-
gular and orthodox form as three volumed
romances, her nine tales would number up even
now no less than twenty-seven volumes. Com-
pacted, each of them, within the compass of a single
book, they make even then a goodly row of nine
handsome octavos. Lying before us, oddly enough,
side by side, there have now come forth together her
first and her last, or—not to be ambiguous in our
way of mentioning them—let us say the earliest and
the latest of her effusions as an imaginative writer.
On one hand wo have " Sir Jasper's Tennant," and
on the other " The Trail of the Serpent." Tho
former already reviewed at some length in
these columns upon the occasion of its first ap-
pearance—while, in many particulars, evidenc-
ing a considerable advance or development of the
novelist's abilities'as an artistic dreamer of dreamers,
can hardly, we are still of opinion, be accorded a very
high place among her productions. With one only
exception, in point of fact, it is to our thinking in-
ferior in interest to them all—the single exception
here referred to being the narrative entitled " John
Marchmont's Legacy." Conspicuously holding its
place of supremacy among all Miss Braddon's
Novels to the last, " Aurora Floyd" is, to our mind,
immediately followed in excellence by " Lady
Audley's Secret" and by " Eleanor's Victory."
Afterwards come in due sequence " Only a Clod,"
and " Henry Dunbar," and " The Doctor's Wife."
Then—" Sir Jasper's Tenant." After that-:-
" John Marchmont's Legacy." And last, in one-
sense, though first in another—" The Trail of the
Serpent." It seems hardly fair, if only by reason of
the inference that might thereupon be drawn by
Miss Braddon's depreciators from any such seem-
ingly apropos phrase, to say, in regard to her whole
series of fictions, that—even ranking them according
to the mere rule of priority or seniority—" The
Trail of the Serpent" is over them all I As an ima-
ginative production it is simply, we take it, to
be regarded, as a gathering together of some
of Miss Braddon's literary wild oats. It is
in no respect whatever, according to our view
of it, to be placed within the same category even
with the least remarkable of our author's other
romances. Written, if we remember rightly, for
the pages of the illustrated penny " London Jour-
nal," it is, from first to last, intensely sensational
iu its character. Its sensationalism, in effect, is
throughout—unmitigated. Of this the authoress is
not only herself perfectly conscious, but frankly
permits the acknowledgment of the fact to appear
in her Publishers' Announcement. The excuse there
advanced is that of innocence or ignorance or how-
ever we may like to term it—an excuse put forth
apparently with a view to the mitigation in
some measure, at least, of the severity of the re-
prehensive terms otherwise all but certain
to be elicited from some among the more captious
or cantankerous of Miss Braddon's critics—to
whom the mere phrase Sensationalism is as the
gleam of a bit of scarlet flourished on the arm
of a toreador in the eyes of an infuriated bull at
a bull fight. "As the word ' sensation' was not
perverted to its present use until after the ' Trail
of the Serpent' had run its unpretentious course"—
thus saith the Publishers' Announcement—" Miss
Braddon may reasonably demand forgiveness on
the ground of having offended unconsciously against
the canons of modern literary criticism." Waiving
that question of Sensationalism, however, altogether
—Sensationalism pure and simple, appearing to us,
to date back long before either Miss Braddon or
Wilkie Collins had put in their appearance as
novelists, before Harrison Ainsworth's " Jack
Sheppard," before Anne Ratcliffe's "Mysteries of
Udolpho," before Charles Maturin's " Melmoth the

Wanderer," back even to that more than precursor
merely, to that very archetype of all the Sen-
sational Romances that have since then been
written. to that famous novel of " Caleb IVil-
Hams," by the father of the authoress of ".r ran-
kenstein"--waiving the whole question, we say,
as to Miss Braddon's larger or lesser share in re-
gard to whatever culpability there may be in the
way of popularising what is absurdly called Sensa-
tionalism, we would say here, in regard to this
earliest of all her fictions, the story entitled by her
" The Trail of the Serpent," that the chief interest
of it is to be found, to our thinking, in an examina-

tion of it by the light cast back upon it by several
of her subsequent performances. So regarding it,
it is really and truly like scrutinising a failure by
the light of several successes—an egregious failure
by the light of several very notable successes. For,
we will even say as a literary production making
the merest superficial pretence to be regarded in
any point of view as a work of art, it might almost
be declared to be artless to the very extravagance of
artlessness. Miss Braddon in this, however, if she
sins against all the rules of probability, at the very
outset of her career, sins thus in truth after all less
flagrantly than does her immediate contemporary,
Mr. Wilkie Collins, at this advanced stage in his
career, in hislatest and most elaborated performance,
meaning his recently completed story of " Arma-
dale." Whereas (at once to make plain our
meaning) Miss Braddon hesitates not to de-
scribe her dumb detective, Mr. Peters, as upon
one occasion soliloquising by actually talking to
himself on his fingers, an incident so utterly im-
probable with any deaf person, even though it were
one naturally predisposed to be the greatest blab
imaginable, but improbable to the very last degree,
one might surely conjecture, in the instance of a
reticent dumb detective—whereas, we say, Miss
Braddon goes that length of improbability in. her
earliest fiction, Mr. Wilkie Collins in the latest and
most elaborate of all his romances, his story of
" Armadale," goes so much further in his outra-
geous violation of alt probability, that he shrinks
not from describing a wily Lamia of a red-haired
wicked beauty like Miss Gwilt, as coolly sitting
down, time after time, in the most purposeless way
conceivable, to jot down in her Diary all her dead-
liest and most evil atrocities of thought, word, and
deed—solely for the purpose, of course, of enabling
them all to be read afterwards (those " trivial, fond
records") by the readers of " Armadale !" Faulty
though " The Trail of the' Serpent" is, valueless
though it is as a work of art, it has a wild
extravagance of interest at times of its own,
yet even then an interest in no degree what-
ever satisfactory. Insomuch that we are
seriously disposed, after all, to doubt the dis-
cretion of the book's republication in its present
form. It will not merely fail to add anything
whatever to Miss Braddon's reputation, but it is cal-
culated seriously to militate against it—for inasmuch
as it affords her rather numerous vilifiers or -vitu-
perators a tolerably colourable excuse, for once in a
way, for insisting upon the reasonableness of their
systematic depreciation of her imaginative produc-
ductions. From Jabez North, otherwise Raymond
de Marolles (a workhouse pauper child turned into
a Parisian Exquisite)—from Kuppins, who is only
another and a very inferior specimen of the Tilly-
slowboy genus of female hobbledehoys—from the
squalor of Blind Peter, which is no more than a
shadowy reflection of Tom-all-alone's--from Slop-

pertou and Mr. Augustus Darley, and Mr. Joseph
Peters (already mentioned) and the Cherokees and
all the rest of them—it is nothing less than re-
freshing to turn back for a while to indulge our-
selves with a merely passing glance of retrospec-
tion at the scenes and people depicted by the same
artist hand-only, how far more artistically in every
touch of it, in " Sir Jasper's Tenant"—at Sir Jasper
Dennison himself, let us say, and at his daughter
Marcia—at George Pauncefort and Henry Adolphus
Dobbs—at Scardalo Abbey and Scarsdale Her-
mitage I

Routledge's Shilling Guide to London—is a very
marvel of cheapness, compactness, and lucidity. It
acquaints the stranger with all he can reasonably
desire to know in regard to this vast metropolis. A
metropolis so vast that it covers an area thirty

miles in circumference—extending into four
counties, namely, into Middlesex, Essex, Kent,
and Surrey containing within it 10,500
streets, squares, and terraces, spread over a space
of ground representing some 78,000 acres or close
upon 121 square miles, comprehending within it
more than 370,000 houses, and peopled by upwards of
3,000,000 inhabitants ! Counting merely the num-
ber of those who are born every week in London, there
are added to the population week after week about
as many infants, male and female, as the years
already numbered in the Christian era-1866
1800 at any rate and upwards. Seeing, however,
that there arc more than 1,200 persons who die every
week in London, when the balance, comes to be struck
between births and deaths the weekly increase of the
population of London by births alone is found
to be between 500 and GOO, or even then not far
short of 100 a day ! Another token of the prodi-
gious scale upon which matters affecting the organi-
sation of the world of London must be computed,
may here be mentioned incidentally, as
a fact, illustrating, at one and the same time,•
the wealth and poverty, the misery and benevolence
of our London population—namely, that most
lamentable yet most consolatory fact that, for the
relief of pauperism amongst us, there are collected
and distributed every week upwards of £30,000
sterling ! A metropolis like this deserves to have
a Guide Book as handy, as cheap, as comprehen-
sible and as comprehensive as this Pocket Guide
just published by the Messrs. Routledge.