character, and an impressive tone in reviving the emotions of the past, are as decidedly important in the qualifications of a novelist, as they are assuredly at the command of the one now before us. But these are the two particulars in which her writings most favourably attract us. In story, she is not always very happy, or original, or painstaking; in miscellaneous character, she is often flighty and inconsistent; in reflective and didactic passages, she occasionally lingers and loiters, and scatters truisms by the way; and as for humour, when it does come, it is by such petty driblets, and in such diluted dulness, that to laugh at it on the right side of the mouth would require a phiz with other facial angles, and a diaphragm of far livelier excitability, than ours. As to style, she indulges to an undue degree in the spasmodic and fragmentary, breaking up her sentences into minute fractions, and isolated interjections, and stammering solecisms, and jerking instalments, and abrupt adjournments; amid which no sober colon can find rest for the sole of his foot, nor even sprightly comma for the curl of his tail. Enough said to prove ourselves no blind neck-or-nothing devotees. Now we may go on praising again, with a comfortable conscience.
Once upon a time we used to dip into what are styled religious novels. That was generally on Sundays. But even on Sundays we are now too dyspeptic for diet so preposterously heavy, and would almost as soon wind up the Sabbath with a profane and profuse supper of pork chops. There is more religion, of a practical, persuasive, and influential sort, we now incline to hold, in the secularities of Mrs. Marsh's fictions, than in the systematised sanctities of the technically-called religious tale. A high, healthy moral tone—freshened and rarefied withal by devout spiritual reverence—imbues her writings. At times, indeed, the structure of her plot is calculated to suggest questions of casuistry, and to elicit, at the best, but an equivocal assent to her own interpretation of duty. But even then, if she errs, it is on the side which a rigid morality would countenance, and judgment rejoice against mercy, self-sacrifice triumph over selfishness, stoic principle over virtuous passion. She has done much, very much, to rescue the novel from the stigma and obloquy of mere frivolity, and to enlist among its admirers, and even its students, those minds of graver cast and stricter demands who were once limited to Hannah More and her apostolical successionists. Evidently and invariably she writes with purity of purpose and earnestness of moral aim; and those who leave her without a sense of being bettered by the intercourse, must, we submit, be rather prejudiced, or very perfect characters. She has laid to heart, and reproduced in breathing "forms and images," something of the philosophy of Wordsworth—
With life and nature purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.[1]
All this, however, without the air of a severe or straitlaced moral essayist, or the production of mere heavy reading. With all her elevated and monitorial accents, there mingles an impassioned tone of chivalrous feel-
- ↑ "The Prelude." Book i.
