The Sun.
London, England, 1866-05-25 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Miss Braddon's New Novel.
The Lady's Mile. Three Vols. By the Author of
"Lady Audley's Secret." Ward, Lock, and Tyler.
Miss Braddon has yet to write a dull book—if
she can ! She has yet to write one, the fate of which
shall be other than successful almost upon the in-
stant of its appearance. Call this luck, if you will,
but there the fact is, and, to say the least of it, it
presents to view a very remarkable coincidence. No
one that has ever read any one among her eight
three-volumed novels—a very library of fiction in
itself, extending now to two-and-thirty volumes
octavo, volumes written, bear in mind, by a
single hand within the lapse of a very few years in-
deed—can complain that he or she, as the case
may be, has been wearied in their perusal by
even a passing sense of tediousness. That, surely,
is much of itself to begin with, but that is not all.
Miss Braddon, in undertaking to build up for her-
self a reputation as a Popular Novelist—and that
she has done so no one will care to deny, even the
most captious and carping of the cavillers by whose
depreciative criticisms she has been assailed at
times with, as it appears to us, a sort of vulgar acri-
mony very ludicrous to see, because so absolutely
uncalled for and unprovoked—Miss Braddon we say,
in building up for herself her reputation as a Popular
Novelist, has looked first of all, in the writing of
every one of the Eight famous three-volumed Stories
she has now penned, to the telling of her story, to
the construction of some plot that shall be inte-
resting throughout, to the enthrallment (so far as
may be in any way within her capacity as a tale-
teller) of all the readers, young or old, coming to
her pages for entertainment. The " story" with
her, in other words, is her first consideration. Sup-
plementary to that comes every other consideration.
The delineation of character, the display of her
descriptive powers, the manifestation of her sense
of the humorous or of the pathetic, of the terrible,
or of the beautiful—all these things are purely
subsidiary. A tale-teller she is, and feels her-
self to be, above all—a bas blue never Her
evidences of reading, her revelations of a delightful
familiarity with the literature of her own country,
and of other countries, are all apropos, are all casual,
parenthetical, purely by-the-way—arc never once,
so to speak, dragged in by the head and shoulders
from any feeling of affectation, still less of
ostentation. It is precisely because of all this, and
because she can relate a story worth listening to,
and in language that it is a pleasure to read—so
clear and diaphonous is it in its lucidity—that, one
after another, she has, in a manner, taken the town
by storm, season after season, with one or two
tales that every reader of novels feels somehow
constrained to read, and that every one of those
readers, once beginning, reads on until the
end—delighted with, by a sort of easy captivation.
So it has been with her eight well-thumbed fictions
—one after another—Lady Audley's Secret, and
Aurora Floyd, and Eleanor's Victory, and Only a
Clod, and Henry Dunbar, and The Doctor's Wife,
and John Marchmont's Legacy, and now last,
and not by any means least, of the well-known
series, this newly-completed novel of The Lady's
I Mile. The mere enumeration above of the title of

its seven predecessors will have reminded those who
are already acquainted with Miss Braddon's capa-
bilities as a novelist that she has hitherto written not
one dull book among those seven. Having said
which, we may premise at once in regard to
this eighth that it is a book to match those
seven predecessors, for inasmuch as it is the
pleasantest reading throughout—for inasmuch
as it is never dull for inasmuch as the
story is interesting in itself, and, besides that, is
told interestingly. It is only fair to Miss Braddon
herself, however, and to her readers also, that we
should add immediately, thereupon, that in writing
it our authoress may be said to have turned over a
new leaf. In " The Lady's Mile" she is hardly at
all—nay, we don't think she is in any way at all—
what people have long since come to speak of,
and know as, Sensational. The incidents flow
on in a manner equably, so to express it—never
once in jerks and spasms. Golden - haired
criminals, black-eye-browed bigamists, slangy
grooms, and blackguard dog-fanciers, no longer
people her chapters cheek-by-jowlwith more respect-
able specimens of our mixed society in thes e
modern times. But instead of all this—we have,
as the title might lead one to anticipate before
opening the first volume —ladies and gentle-
men ad libitum, artists and merchants, bar-
risters, and country gentlemen, officers in the.
army, and members of Parliament, just the class of
people one may see at this time of the year in the
saddle or rolling in their carriages along the well-
watei.ed sweep of " The Lady's Mile," Hyde-
park, midway between Knightsbridge and Bays-
water. The Lady Cecil Chudleigh, orphan daughter
of Lord Aspendell is the heroine of the story—
a fair exemplar enough of your high aristocrat, one
wanting sadly no doubt in a certain mysterious
quality called " go ;" but having, we are told, a pro-
file like a cameo and a style in its way unexception-
able. Speaking of her, in fact (that is, of the Lady
Cecil) we are informed by our authoress that a gen-
tleman of the genus Swell was thus heard to re-
mark about the heroine of " The Lady's Mile"
upon one occasion :—" If polygamy were admis-
sible," quoth be, " I'd marry Lady Cecil to-morrow.
She is the woman of women to sit at the bead of
a fellow's table and do him credit in society ; but
if I were going home half-seas-over after a four-in-
hand club-dinner at Richmond, I'd as soon have
Lady Macbeth sitting up for me as Lord Aspendell's
daughter. Not that she'd be coarse or low, like the
Scotchwoman, you know—not a bit of it She'd
receive me with a stately curtsey, and freeze me to
death with her claSsic profile. Egad ! when you
come to think of it, you know, old fellow, there
must be a hitch somewhere in the matrimonial law-
Society doesn't confine a man to one horse; society
doesn't compel him to ride his park-hack across
country, or harness his racing stud to his drag ; and
yet society limits an unhappy beast to one wife ; and
if he marries a nice little indulgent creature who
won't look black at him when he goes home late or
smokes in the dining-room, the odds are that she'll
freeze his marrow by dropping her h's and talking
of her par—who was something in the soap-boiling
way—at an archbishop's state-dinner." Her lady-
ship's ancestral home in North Devon—Chudleigh
Combo by name—is perfectly in keeping with the
portraiture of her own fair self—Chudleigh
having among its adornments, we learn—besides

" a handsome collection of Oriental china, and a
good deal of quaintoldfurniture ; brass-inlaid chests

of drawers, wherein Evelina and Cecilia might have
kept their finery; Indian secretaires, at which Cla-
rissa Harlowe might have written her famous let-
ters ; high-backed chairs, on which Sir • Charles
Grandison might have sat, gentlemanlike and un-
bending." As for the hero of the tale—Hector
Gordon—when we are first introduced to him, Cap-
tain, afterwards Colonel of his Regiment—he is
a tall, handsome, accomplished specimen of
what an officer and a gentleman ought to
-oe, and -withal a charmingly fresh illus-
tration of those rare graces discoverable in
your high-bred Scotchman, graces that our autho-
ress asks, with seeming surprise, "Has any one ever
sung ?" Adding, thereupon, to her own inquiry—
" What words can fairly describe the nameless
fascination which has a dash of the Irishman's insi-
(Vous flattery, a spice of the Frenchman's brilliant
vivacity, but which has a tender softness possessed
by neither, a patrician grace not to be equalled by
any other nationality in the world ? In all the his-
tory of modern Europe, the two people who, by
manner alone, have exercised the most powerful
influence upon their contemporaries, have been Mary
Queen of Scots, and her great-grandson Charles
Stuart. Of all the poets, who has ever so enthralled
the hearts of women as George Gordon, Lord Byron,
whose maternal lineage was Scotch ? Of all lovely
and fascinating women whose names will be remem-
bered in the future, is there any fairer or lovelier than
Eugenie Marie de Guzman, Countess of Teba, Em-
press of the French, and scion of the Kirkpatricks
of Closeburn ?" Mention might here also have
been made by Miss Braddon of that paragon
of paragons, the Admirable Crichton, about the
noblest specimen of all, surely, of your high-
bred Scotchman ! It is with the old well-born,
thrifty aunt of them both— by the way (that is, of
both hero and heroine)—Mrs. Maclaverhouse—
that Lady Cecil is living as companion when she
first makes the acquaintance of Captain Gordon on
his return from India on sick leave ! A curious old
dame whose love of economic arrangements, not to
talk of her appetite for the paring of cheeses or the
skin of flints, is happily indicated among other
similar remarks by the following :
"Don't tell me that I've known them for years and
never known them rob me !" exclaimed the widow.
[She is talking of her attendants.] " They may
have robbed me without my knowing it, or they may
not have robbed me because I never gave them the oppor-
tunity ; and they may begin to rob me to-morrow if they
get the chance. Look at the Bishop of Northlandshire's
butler, who had lived with him thirteen years, and ran
away with five hundred pounds' worth of plate in the
fourteenth. Look at Sir Harry Hinchliffe's vallet, who
was such a faithful creature that his master left him an
annuity of two hundred a year ; which he would have en-
joyed very much, no doubt, if he hadn't stripped the house
while his benefactor's corpse was lying in it, and had not
been transported for life in consequence. Don't talk to
me about honesty, Cecil. If Mrs. Krewson is an honest
woman, why do her eyes sparkle so when I order a large
joint, and why are two quarts of Bisque barely enough for
six 1"

Other heroes and heroines there are of course
whose histories are related in the ravelling and
unravelling of the thread of the narra-
tive of this new story of Miss Braddon's,
hight "The Lady's Mlle"—others, we mean, besides
the two principal ones just now particularised, to
wit, Lady Cecil and Captain Gordon. There are,
for example, Philip Foley, the young artist,
and Florence Crawford, the coquettish daughter
of William Crawford, the great academician. Again,
there is this very father of Florence's, Mr. Craw-
ford, R.A., and the fastidious and elegant young
widow, Mrs. Cha-mpernowne. Neither Hector and
Cecil—nor Philip and Florence make a match of
it, as it happens ! Hector marrying in India—Lady
Cecil espousing a big Irish barrister—and Florence
taking as her husband what an English dealer
in slang would call a " Cad," and what a Yankee
dealer in slang would term a "Cuss," one Mr. Lobyer
of Lobyer cotton mills, Lancashire. Further than
this we will afford no clue whatever through the
winding labyrinth of the plot. We are tempted
to give, however, in extenso, as perhaps the most
touching incident of all in the narrative, the fol-

lowing :
it was the middle of August, and the picture wanted
little more than a week's work for its completion, when
the painter yielded for the first time to that languid feel-
ing in the eyelids, and abandoned his work in order to in-
dulge in a brief siesta. All the clocks of Kensington had
just struck three, and the vibration of the different chimes
came floating across the painter's garden. It was an al-
most. insupportable summer day—sultry and oppressive—
the day of all others on which the hardest worker is apt to
be seized with a distaste for his labour.
" It's no use," said Mr. Crawford, as he gave a last look
at his canvas ; " I can scarcely see the colours lam using.
I can't stand against this drowsiness any longer."
He threw himself upon a sofa, a noble couch of strictly
classic form, upon which had erst reclined Aspasia the
wise and beautiful, or at any rate the dark-haired mcdel
who had sat for the Grecian beauty; that maligned en-
chantress who sinned against poetry by descending from a
Pericles to a cattle-dealer. The painter fell asleep almost
immediately ; but for some time after he had lain down he
had a dim consciousness of pain above his eyebrows. By
and by, however, the slumber grew deeper ; he no longer
heard the bees humming in his roses, the subdued roll of
distant wheels. He fell into a long dreamless sleep, from
which he awoke at last very suddenly, with a feeling that
he had slept for many hours.
He had slept for a very long time as it seemed, for it was
quite dark when he awoke.
"No more work to-day," he thought with a sigh. " I
counted on getting an hour between five and six. Why
hasn't Dimond lighted my lamps ?"
The painter groped his way to the bell and rang vio-
lently.
"What a night !" he muttered ; " there must be a
storm brewing. I haven't known it as dark as this all the

summer."
He stood by the mautlepiece waiting. The window
was opposite him, and he felt the warm summer air float-
ing in upon him where ho stood. But he could not even
define the broad opening of the window through the pro-
found darkness.
"Lights, Dimond," he said impatiently, as the man
opened the door.
" Lights, sir ?"
"Yes ; of course. Why have you left the lamps till this
time ? Why isn't that passage lighted ?"
" But it's so early, sir—not much after five--and such a
bright afternoon. I didn't think you'd like me to light the
gas yet awhile,"
" Not much after five o'clock !" repeated the painter in a
tone of utter stupefaction.
" No, sir ; just a quarter past by your own clock, sir."
" And a bright afternoon ?" he asked in the same tone.
" Well,—of course, sir, I don't presume to say as re-
gards paintin' ; but in a general way a very bright after-
noon."
" 0 my God !" cried the painter suddenly.
The servant ran to his master, alarmed by that sudden
exclamation, which sounded like a cry of agony.
"Is anything the matter, sir ?"
"No ; go—go and get me a cab —immediately—l must
go out—and I shall want you to go with me."
" Me, sir ?"
" Yes, you, sir ! Go at once man, for God's sake—and
lose no time about it."
The servant departed in bewilderment of mind, and
William Crawford groped his way through the outer dark-
ness to the nearest chair. He sunk into the chair, covered
his face with his hands, and burst into tears.
" Blind!" he cried ; " blind ! blind ! I said I had
nothing but my art, and now my art is lost to me."
He sat with his head bent forward on his breast, staring
hopelessly into the darkness. Strain his eyeballs as he
might, they could not pierce that darkness. He saw no
Psyche and the Zephyrs, no lovely images created by his
hand, no bright glimpseof summer sunshine on the smooth
green lawn, no changing light upon the summer flowers,
no tender shadows from the grand old cedars—only dark-
ness, utter darkness ; beyond which it might be that his
eyes were never again to penetrate.
"Cab, sir," said the man, presenting himself in the door-
way.

Come here, Dimond," William Crawford said very
quietly ; "come close to me, and give mo your arm, please.
I beg your pardon if I was impatient just now, but I have
had a great shock. I have been working too hard lately,
and have injured my sight. God only knows whether
the injury is to be a lasting one ; but for the moment I am
quite blind. I think perhaps I shall manage better if you
give me your hand to lead m,e to the cab. I must go at
once to an occulist, and I shall want you to go with me."
Our authoress herself acknowledges (p. 149, Vol. I.)
that " there is no finer tonic for the true worker
than adverse criticism" ; observing, moreover, that
whereas " the friend's lavish praise may enervate :
the foe's hardest usage braces and fortifies."
Wherefore we would here, before closing these
!marks of ours upon " The Lady's Mile," throw
out the hint (not as foe. be sure, but far rather
as one among the many friends she has won to her-
self by her writings) that the capital portraiture
she has given here in this new book of herself of the
burly boisterous Irish Advocate, Mr. O'Boyneville,
would have been much more humorously pencilled

to the life, if she had not so unnaturally made him
upon any and every occasion, do—what bar-
risters, as a rule, never do—talk shop ! It is an
error of art on the Novelist's part, -as a delinea-
tion of her contemporaries. Again—while that
odious " Cad" or " Cuss" as we have called him,
Mr. Lobyer to wit, is rather too distinctly sugges-
tive of a combination of Toots and the Game
Chicken—Mr. O'Boyneville is after his fashion sug-
gestive of a rolling into one and the same person of
Mr. Boythorne and Mr. Striver. It seems very cap-
tious, however, to take even these exceptions to
The Lady's Mile—seeing that this last among Miss
Braddon's eight brilliant three-volumed novels is,
as a pictare of every day life, not only to our
thinking delightful throughout, but, as a whole,
true, both in its outlines and in its colouring, to
that mixed society of which its gifted artist intends
it to be another life-like delineation.

' •
VI/art 4.R
Lc-- erntbr

HER MAJESTY.

- 0
WINDSOR CASTLE, Thursday..

This day her Alajesty completed her 47th yeir.
The Queen drove in the grounds yesterday
afternoon and walked and drove again this .morn-
ing, accompanied by her Royal Highness Princess
Helena.

Their Royal Highnesses Princess Louise, Princess
Beatrice, and Prince Arthur also walked and drove. }
Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess
of Wales, attended by the Countess of Macclesfield
and Major Teesdale, and Prince Alfred, attended
by the Hon. Eliot Yorke, arrived at the Castle
this morning, and remained to luncheon.
Count Gleishen also arrived and remained to
luncheon.
Prince Arthur arrived at the Castle yesterday's
attended by Major Elphinstone.

The Prince and Princess of Wales.
The Prince and Princess of Wales, accompanied
by Prince Alfred, visited the Queen at Windsor
Castle yesterday morning.
Their Royal Highnesses dined with the Puke
and Duchess of Sutherland, at Stafford House, iu
the evening.

Her Majesty will leave Windsor Castle to-dal
for Cliveden, the Duchess (Dowager) of Sutherland's seat,
near Maidenhead, where her Majesty will pass a fortniglit,
surrounded by her family.
Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and rrinCeSs
of Wales will leave Marlborough House on Monday net,
for Titness, near Ascot, for the race week. The prince en"
princess return to town on Saturday, the 2d proximo.
Prince and Princess Cellinci are expected to-
day at Cataldi's Hotel, Dover-street, from Rome, for the
season.
The Duke of Somerset, as First Lord of the
Admiralty, will give a full-dress dinner to-morrow evening
at the Admiralty.
The Marquis and Marchioness of Hastings, and
Sir Piers and Lady Mostyn have left the St. George 'S
Hotel.
the Marquis d'Andigne has arrived at the
Clarendon Hotel, from Paris.
The Earl and Countess Granville are expected
to arrive at their residence in Bruton-street to-day from
Walmer Castle.
The Earl Russell will receive a select party f °
peers at dinner to-morrow in celebration of h©r Majesty
birthday.