brained vivacity for our liking, and though quite good enough, is not much to good for the gallant colonel.
But Mrs. Marsh's power is still more distinctly marked in the striking novel of "Ravenscliffe." The character of Randal Langford, conceived and executed with evident study, leaves an impression of almost unmitigated pain. We inspect a fierce, violent nature; passionate yet hard, fiery but cold; which contrasts have been aggravated, not softened, by the education of an iron father, and a rigid, reserved, impassive mother—such education as a Dominican inguisitor might have given in the bosom of a Protestant church. From childhood, his passions, extraordinary in their force, have been all driven in—his tenderer feelings chilled, every softer imagination blighted. A stanch sense of duty he has; but the strong cord which binds him to it is made up in part only of principle, partly, also, of doggedness and pride. That tall, gaunt young man, harsh and stern of visage, ungraceful in gait, overbearing in mien, dogmatical in tone—the very being to be implicated in social broils—has been brought up in puritan seclusion, and saturated with contemptuous abhorrence of certain social excrescences, especially duelling. And he it is whom we have to see horsewhipped, at high noon, in the public walk of his college grounds, before a crowd of collegiate and promiscuous gazers; but the only means in the world's eye for wiping out the stain, he has been taught to despise as cowardly and degrading; he has loudly and constantly enforced that doctrine himself; his enforcement of it has been so public, so repeated, so tranchant, so unmodified, that it seems impossible for him to recede with honour. Such is the "fix" in which Randal is placed; such the horns of the dilemma by which he is tossed and gored. It argues the adventurous daring of Mrs. Marsh to conjure up difficulties of so perplexing au order; and although the effect is necessarily disagreeable, and the conduct of the struggle open to objection from different quarters, she, at least, "rides on the whirlwind, and directs the storm" like one not unused to such terrible voyaging. Randal's mother, Mrs., or "Madam" Langford, is ably delineated, like some scowling family portrait which offends the eye, while attracting it on the score of artistic truth—a cold, stiff, rigid woman, of undeviating moral rectitude, strong puritan piety, and severe sense of duty, of haughty as well as frigid temper; always supposing blame, whoever the person charged, where blame could be supposed, and visiting mistakes, faults, or crimes, with the same unsparing rigour. Where blame is futile, she takes refuge in what is justly called "that worst alternative in such cases—an awful, portentous, a barren, dreary silence, far worse in its effects upon family harmony than the most passionate and stormy explanations." How characteristic of the Ravenscliffe circle, that when a letter comes from the university, announcing Randal's expulsion, the father should hand it in silence to bis wife, and then, without note or comment, to his son—that the three should read it (each and all morbidly sensitive to the family honour), and not one word be uttered, not the slightest symptom of feeling or sympathy betrayed. If Randal is, as we believe, an improbability, not so his parents. They and he are all finely individualised; but in his case the individuality is a mistake: he would not have practically realised so many theoretical contraries; no such positive result could have been worked out of such negative terms.
