Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/179

than can justify their entrée, whether by relationship to the unity of action, or by individuality and personal pretensions; it is often desultory, fragmentary, and (are we coining a word?) platitudinary. The clue to the mystery, retailed charily bit by bit, is doled out more in accordance with the exigencies of novel-craft than with the probabilities of actual life: of course, it was proper in fiction that Anne Ross and Jacky, her elfin familiar, should have the glory of making Norman's righteousness to shine forth as the noon-day, but we demur to its being as agreeable to fact that three sharp-witted men should be balked so signally on the same mission. We lost something of our reverence for James Aytoun's legal acumen, and his companions’ shrewd intelligence, when they failed to make anything of past and present memorabilia in the career of Patrick Lillie—his known aversion to the murdered man, his strange agony on the fatal morning, ond his subsequent moody seclusion, betraying all the signs of a perturbed spirit that could not rest. The author is fond of getting up a surprise; but it is not always that it succeeds: instead of doing execution, there is often a mere flash in the pan, which startles none but raw recruits. But taking it altogether, the interest of "Merkland" is well sustained, and frequently reaches a high standard. Passages in abundance of power and pathos reward the reader. Such as Mrs. Catherine's revelation of the dark deed to little Alison Aytoun, as the impassable "let and hindrance" to the fair child's becoming a child-wife—when they sat together beneath the portrait of Sholto Douglas, and Alice was bidden, and tried not to tremble, as her aged companion began the narrative—glancing the while at out-door objects to which the waning gloaming gave a ghostly aspect—the grey, inquisitive-looking crag, behind which she could fancy some malicious elf watching them, the dark whins pressing close to the window, the dreary sough of the wind as it swept through the bare trees without, and the long passages within, moaning so eerie and spirit-like, together with the gloom of the mysterious apartment devoted to this sad tryst, and the calm unmoved face looking down from the wall on this conference of "youthheid" and eld. So again the description of the "eviction" of the Macalpines, by order of the innovating Southron proprietor of Strathoran, where we trace the progress of destruction by the agonised looks of the ejected peasantry, and hear confusedly a sharp sudden cry from some distressed mother as the roof under which her little ones were born is rudely destroyed, and the father's long, low groan, and the suppressed passion of young men who cannot school themselves to patience, and the plaintive cry of shrill dismay and wonder from little children clinging about their feet, while house after house, unwindowed, roofless, and doorless, stands in mute desolation behind the hirelings of oppressive law, until the chill March wind rushes into the last dismantled cottage, and the Macalpines are without a home; or Miss Crankie's garrulous narrative of the tragedy, and Anne's subsequent encounter of Christian Lillie on that still night, wrapt in grey misty folds, when she wandered musingly along the dim sands, and watched a faint ray of moonlight silvering the water, and the long glistening line of its wet shores here add there, till (fit place and time for such a meeting) the tall, dark, gliding figure met her, moving with noiseless footstep over the sand from the gate of Schole, a dreary, mysterious house, by the way, which, with its strange brother and sister tenants, reminds us of the House of the Seven Gables, whereby