The Sun. — 1869-06-28 (London, England)

LITERATURE.  The Minister's Wife. By Airs. Oliphant. Three  Vols. Hurst and Blackett.  Another three-volumed novel from the author of the famous " Chronicles of Carliugford" is, in truth, at all times, a most welcome announcement. It is as welcome, nowadays, to the lovers of fiction as it used to be in the early part of the century, when a new work was announced by the author of the " Chronicles of the Canongate." Far more welcome than it used to bo more recently when the same tidings were made public in regard to the author of the " Chronicles of Clovernook." Standing upon a lower grade than that Master Novelist and Prince of Romaucists, the great Sir Walter—Mrs. Oliphant is not only, as a novelist and as a romancist, but still more as a delineator of character, to our thinking at least, raised as upon a dais far above the level of Douglas Jerrold. Tozer the Butterman takes his place by right among the humorous creations peopling like actually human beings the wonderful world of English light literature. " Salem Chapel," the title of the particular story in which that same Tozer was happily made known to us, still remains, in our estimation of Mrs. Oliphant's now voluminous works, her unquestionable masterpiece. Other popular, and many of them really admirable, fictions she has written—some of the very best of these, moreover, as additions to that same series of the " Chronicles of Carlingford." But not one of them yet, to our mind, can be regarded as in any way comparable to " Salem Chapel," with its Deacon Tozer, the Butterman. Works as various as " Zaidee," and the " Brownlows," and the " Athelings," and " Miss Majoribanks," and " John Rintoul," and " Katie Stewart," and a long radiant catalogue of others, needless here to be accurately enumerated, have rendered the name of this rarely gifted novelist welcome iu our ears and pleasant to our eyes, whenever it has greeted us afresh upon any title-page. It is rather in her character as the biographer of " The Rev. Edward Irving," that she appears before us here as the writer of these three volumes, entitled " The Minister's Wife." It is rather as the celebrant of the phenomenon of the Unknown Tongues, than as the novelist, pure and simple, that Mrs. Oliphant tells this tale about Loch Diarmid. The picture she has here drawn—we must say at once —is not in her old radiant colouring. It is rather like a drafting in sepia upon toned paper. Besides which, some of the characters are half crazed by religious fanaticism—conspicuous among these being Ailie Campbell and her husband (eventually), Mr. John, otherwise John Diarmid of Ardnamore. All that relates to those two is repugnant to 113. We are sick to death of it long before the story has been half related. We are tempted to skip all the duller portions relating to those tedious lunatics and their eerie revivalism. The ir.terest of the plot, iu truth, lies almost entirely in all that refers to the twin sisters of the Glebe, the orphan daughters of the late Captain Duncan—Margaret, the saintly elder of the two by a few minutes, and Isabel, the reel heroine of the tale. Volume one closes with the death of Margaret. Volume two ends with the murder of Isabel's first husband. For she marries twice, and, liorrible to relate, takes (unwittingly) as her second husband the murderer of her first—Mr. Lothian, the clergyman of the Manse being the first husband, and the second one, who is, as we have said, his ruthless and most despicable murderer, being a young Englishman,