machinery to manufactures, while it converted the small handicraftsman into a great employer of labour, proportionately enriched the lord of the soil. The scientific improvement of agricultural methods converted great tracts of waste and moorland into highly-rented farms. Above all, the rapidly-increasing consumption of coal and iron, alike for domestic, commercial, and military purposes, made the great mines which underlay the patrimony of the Percies a veritable El-Dorado. And, as though to complete the harmonious regularity with which each succeeding age brings its characteristic contribution to the Percies' wealth, the most conspicuous addition which our generation has made to the beauty and convenience of the capital-the great Embankment of the Thames-brought the present Duke of Northumberland a compensatory sum as large as the total fortune of many a peer who is considered wealthy. But the fact which, after all, gives their historic interest to these splendid annals, and redeems from tedium the long tale of acquisition and aggrandizement, is the conspicuous witness which they bear to the historic continuity of English life, and to the penetrating influence, enduring even to our own day, of the Feudal System. For though, as we have already seen, actual and unmixed Feudalism fell with the fall of the Earl of Northumberland on Bramham Moor, its effects and influence are never absent for long together from the annals of the Percies. Nay, they have not yet been eradicated. We trace the same spirit, under varying forms, from the beginning of their story to the present day. We see it in the first heiress of the Housethe gentle Lady Agnes-bestowing her hand on the brother of the Queen of England, but retaining her maiden-name, and presiding in queenly state over her own 'Court.' We see it in the Crusader-lord, dying under the walls of the Holy City; in the stout baron, who helps to extort the Charter from King John; in the gallant soldiership of Hotspur and his brother Ralph; in the regal living of Henry the Magnificent,' importing into the bleak North all the luxury and refinement of the Renaissance, and set forth, with delightful fulness of detail, in the invaluable Household Book' of Northumberland. We see another aspect of the same feudal spirit in the proud submission, the dignified obedience,' of the heir to all this splendour—' the unthrifty Earl,'-receiving his early discipline as a page in the household of Cardinal Wolsey. And then again, as the old order of society passes away, and makes room for the new, we discern again and again the recrudescence of the feudal spirit; in the military authority exercised, though under constitutional forms, by the Lords of Alnwick over the wild popu lations lations of the Border; in the elaborate precautions taken, while allying the heiresses of the House with the noblest English blood, to retain the Norman name and its ancient dignities; in the elaborate ceremony and state which surround the successive heads of the House, the social homage which they exact, and the civil influence which they assume as a matter of right, and exercise unquestioned, under varying forms of national polity. And, coming down towards our own time, we recognize the old tone of traditional mastery in the circular of instructions issued by the second Duke to his nominees in Parliament; while hardly less suggestive of the antique world,' and its 'constant service' are the same Duke's orders to his house-steward, butler, and clerk of the kitchen, with a view to economy in the domestic consumption of food, at a time of general distress and high prices. Even at the present day, if we are correctly informed, the old spirit survives in the administration of stately Alnwick, and in the tenure of its broad domains. The hardy farmers of Northumberland accompany their periodical disbursements to His Grace's steward by the formal presentation of a lamb or a rose; and the commonplace process of paying rent is rendered romantic by symbolical acts which acknowledge, with all the picturesque expressiveness of the Middle Age, the supreme rights of the lord of the soil. We close Mr. de Fonblanque's sumptuous volumes with the sense, that they record the annals of a fortunate as well as a famous race. And when we regard the historic greatness of the Percies, their narrow escape from extinction in the seventeenth century, and their present condition of established prosperity, we are reminded of that charming story, in which our greatest master of Romance describes the varying fortunes of the House of Avenel, and the sympathetic apparitions of its tutelary Spirit. When it seemed that the ancient line had dwindled down to a single life, and that its warlike blood flowed only in the veins of one defenceless girl, the White Lady's golden girdle, once a massive chain, was diminished to the fineness of a silken thread.' But when an auspicious marriage had renewed the race, and promised the due perpetuation of its honours, then the white Lady, whose apparitions had been infrequent when the House of Avenel seemed verging to extinction, was seen to sport by her haunted well, with a zone of gold around her bosom as broad as the baldrick of an Earl.' ART. London, 1881. ART. VI.-1. Heaps of Money. By W. E. Norris. London, 1877. 2. Mademoiselle de Mersac. By the Same. London, 1880. 3. Matrimony. By the Same. 4. No New Thing. By the Same. 5. Thirlby Hall. By the Same. 6. Adrian Vidal. By the Same. London, 1883. 7. The Man of his Word, and other Short Stories. By the Same. London, 1886. 8. The Bachelor's Blunder. By the Same. London, 1886. 9. My Friend Jim. By the Same. London, 1886. 10. Major and Minor. By the Same. London, 1887. 11. Chris. By the Same. London, 1888. 12. The Rogue. By the Same. London, 1888. A FEW years ago we were turning over the leaves of a kind of literary album, in which were preserved in manuscript striking scenes or happy descriptive passages chosen from modern fiction. There was a good deal that was clever, and a great deal that was in many ways impressive; but we were becoming aware of a feeling of monotony, when we came upon an extract in which an almost forgotten note seemed to be struck. The simplicity, the quiet humour, and the minuteness of observation, shown in the passage, took us back to the 'Vicar of Wakefield,’ and Washington Irving; while the writer's power of style was at once apparent in the air of drowsiness and calm which he was able to breathe into his description of Sunday in an English village. Young Maxwell returns after many wanderings to the scene of his boyhood, and finds the same routine which, week after week and year after year, had enacted itself in that sleepy hollow. The extract is from Mr. Norris's Thirlby Hall:' 'The next day being Sunday, my uncle and I of course went to church in the morning. The old square pew in which we sat, with its worm-eaten boards, its green baize curtain above them, and its shabby cushions and hassocks; the faint musty smell, for which partly damp and partly the remains of our decaying ancestors were responsible; the village choir in the gallery bawling out "I will arise" to the accompaniment of various musical instruments, which had always been dimly associated in my imagination with King Nebuchadnezzar and his image of gold-all these things brought back vividly to me the days of my boyhood; days that seemed then far more remote than they do now. I am afraid my mind was a good deal more occupied with memories and vain regrets than with the prayers and the Rector's subsequent homily. 6 This, like all his discourses, was constructed on time-honoured and unvarying lines. Firstly: What was so-and-so? Was it this? -No. Was it that ?-No. Was it something else altogether improbable ? improbable ?-Again, no. What, then, was it? Which led to the agreeable discovery that, after all, it was very much what the untutored mind would have pronounced it to be at first sight. Secondly: How was this doctrine illustrated by examples from Holy Writ? Examples from Holy Writ, numerous and more or less apposite, followed. Finally, brethren, how did this great truth come home to all of us? The unsatisfactory conclusion being that it ought to come home to us all in many ways, but that, by reason of the hardness of our hearts, it didn't. Then there was a great scuffling of hobnailed boots, a great sigh of relief, and we were dismissed. Sir Digby and Lady Welby were always waiting for us in the porch, and Sir Digby invariably remarked that the weather was seasonable, while Lady Welby as invariably informed us that she had a headache, "but not one of my bad ones to-day." Then they got into their yellow chariot and were driven away, and my uncle and I walked down the churchyard path to our more modest equipage.' It was this passage which introduced to us the work of Mr. Norris, and we have since read Thirlby Hall' and his other novels with great pleasure and admiration. It is true that most of his novels have won their way into cheaper editions, and three of them, 'Mademoiselle de Mersac,' 'Matrimony,' and No New Thing,' have attained that measure of popularity, of which the outward and visible sign is bad print, and the superscription, Fcap. 8vo, picture-boards, 2s.' Yet his works are unknown to scores of thousands who have read-or who are declared to have at least purchased-The Hansom Cab'; and there may be some use in indicating the fatted calf to those who are fain to fill their bellies with the husks that the swine ate. For surely never was there an age in which the emptiest literary husks were more eagerly devoured than now, nor in which there was less excuse for its depraved appetite. For we heartily recognize many high qualities and hopeful elements in the English school of fiction of to-day. If its style does not flash and burn like the French, we must remember that it is so difficult to write a really classic French sentence, that only the fit writers survive and the unfit perish. A book written as is the Mystery of a Hansom Cab' could not exist in French; we doubt, indeed, whether a French Hawley Smart would be possible. But after all, it is as much the good luck as good guidance of a Bourget or a Droz which has brought it to pass that a French sentence must either be written correctly, or must obviously be no sentence at all.* Though we have but few writers whose pages *M. Scherer, whose recent loss the literary world has to deplore, is far more fastidious. He divides the novels of his own country into two classes-those which are written and those which are not written. With the latter he ranges our English school. scintillate scintillate like those of George Meredith and R. L. Stevenson, we have many whose style more or less nearly approximates to that of Mr. Norris; that is, to the style of one who always writes like a gentleman, and often like a wit and a scholar. Surely the present generation, when it betakes itself to its husks, can by no means plead in excuse any want of variety in the good grain offered for its acceptance. Among living novelists, Black, Blackmore, Hardy, Meredith, Baring-Gould, Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Burnett, the Sisters Gerard, Miss Fothergill, offer each diverse samples of good wholesome grain. And may it not be procured, chopped to the finest tenuity in the analytical school of America, with its dozen or so of reasons why a girl did not smile? Nay, even theology is held to the lips of the novel reader of the present day, if he prefers his theology diluted. We, for our part, recommend him to take it neat. When we say that we owe Mr. Norris thanks for writing like a scholar, we have no fear of misconstruction; but when we go so far as to congratulate him on writing like a man of ordinary education, we feel we owe him an apology. This is a quality which ought to belong to all novelists, and to ascribe it to Mr. Norris is indeed to damn him with faint praise. But we have now reached an epoch in literature at which this praise, humble as it is, can be awarded to very few. Fully fifty per cent. of the novelists of the present day will write 'whom he said was his brother'; and about seventy-five per cent. will offend the taste of their readers with a sentence like this, which we quote from an accepted purveyor of fiction, the prolific Hawley Smart: 'A veritable storm in a teacup this, no doubt, but it is precisely such little convulsions that constitute the salt of existence in small country towns.' There is a sentence which will pass muster with the careless reader, but it is disfigured by a vulgarity of style which lies deeper than grammatical solecisms. The sentence is the work of a writer who has not words to say what he means, who takes refuge in utterly outworn figures which he does not clearly conceive, and who finally flounders into a confusion of metaphors which is just not sufficiently marked to be amusing like the blunders ascribed to Sir Boyle Roche, and generally laid to the account of Irish oratory, where the exuberance, not the poverty, of imagination is as a rule the source of the incongruity. The vulgar mind is always under the dominion of some form of words which happens for the time to be in the ascendant. |