when, if He compared their anxiety to a mother's anguish, He promised them also a mother's bliss: "A woman, when she is in labour, hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but when she hath brought forth the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. So also you now indeed have sorrow; but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man shall take from you."* Thus does the Holy Scripture conspire to send us to the Mother of our Lord as the pattern of our joy and sorrow, and the object of our loving congratulation and condolence when we meditate on her Son's birth, passion, and triumph. He is born to us, therefore we are told to rejoice with her as a mother over her son; He died for us, and we are to mourn over Him with Mary, as one that mourns for his only and his first-born son. He rose again, and exalted our nature to the right hand of God; and our joy is to be that of "the mother who remembereth no more her anguish." Scripture, in all these mysteries, sends us to her; promising that if we truly sympathise with her, we shall "suck and be filled with the breasts of her consolations, and flow with delights from the abundance of her glory." But the sympathy must not be a mere poetical, mawkish, and barren feeling, such as we have after reading a novel or seeing a tragedy acted. It must be a religious sympathy, an act of free-will, assisted by "the spirit of grace and of prayers," abstracting us from our own cares, sorrows, and pleasures, and uniting our hearts to the maternal heart of Mary. The spirit of grace enables us to receive what God sends, and inclines our hearts towards divine things; the spirit of prayer enables the mind to pour itself out, to forget its own interests, and to throw itself entirely into the great facts which it contemplates. In other words, the sympathy with Mary is a grace of God; and it is manifested and exercised in the way of prayer. Therefore, if on the one hand, as our author confesses, "there is something so touching in the thought of standing with the Mother of Jesus beside His cross," so there is, on the other hand, nothing perverted in the devotion which looks at Him only through the pierced heart of His mournful Mother."

But our author goes on to say, that the depth of Mariolatry is in the application of hymns and psalms originally written in honour of God to the honour of Mary. Now we have proved that the devotion to Jesus is to be approached in a spirit of sympathy with Mary, and that this sympathy is to be shown in the way of prayer. But are these prayers to be addressed to God, or to the Blessed Virgin herself? The Protestant, of

St. John xvi. 21, 22.

course, answers at once, To God only; it is blasphemy to speak to any one else in His presence. What would be thought of a man visiting court, and instead of speaking to the Queen, chattering with the courtiers? Fortunately, however, for the defence of the Catholic practice, we have a representation of the Court above, in which the angels are represented not as addressing God directly, but as crying one to another, Holy, holy, holy! We have also the inspired ritual of the synagogue, comprised in the book of Psalms, where, in matter of fact, creatures are addressed almost as frequently as God Himself. In this ritual, still in use both with Catholics and Protestants, who read it through, good souls, without once dreaming of the "Popery" they are practising, there is hardly a creature of God that we do not invoke to join us in praising Him. In other words, the inspired "form of prayer" consists nearly as much in addresses to creatures as in addresses to God. In one of the Psalms the "queen" is spoken of, and she is immediately afterwards addressed as "the king's daughter." Who is this, in our mouths, but the Blessed Virgin? We have, then, scriptural precept for sympathy with her, for thinking of her, for letting her memory dwell on our hearts; may it not rise to our lips? We have scriptural example for this too. As we cannot recite the Psalter with intelligence without addressing her, it is absurd to say that it is wrong to do so. But if we are to address her in the way of sympathy, by "the spirit of prayers," what words, what form are we to use? Are we to be left to our own devices, or are we more or less to imitate the models given us? But if we do this, we fall under our author's anathema, and plunge ourselves into "the deepest depths of Mariolatry." What are we to do, then? Under the shadow of the ancient Church, shall we do that which her saints have done for ages, and which experience has proved not.to be fraught with that mischief which its opponents predicated of it? or shall we be frightened by the warnings of a young lady in crinoline, mistake her parasol for a pastoral staff, and her childish quibbles for reason? Three hundred years ago, men, stronger in head than she is, rose against us, and declared that in honouring the Mother we dishonoured the Son, in confessing Mary we denied Christ. What is the result? Let Geneva and Scotland declare. Both Mother and Son are denied; Socinianism has in great measure succeeded Calvinism; while the old Church goes on as at first, honouring the Son through the Mother, still confessing Christ, because she never denied her who bore Him, to whom He was so many years subject and obedient in the holy house of Bethlehem.

200

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS.*

"NOVELS and Novelists from Elizabeth to Victoria" is an ambitious text. Truth compels us to state that Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson's gifts as a preacher are altogether inadequate to do justice to the subject he or his publisher has chosen for the exercise of his powers. He has neither read enough, nor thought enough, to enable him to grapple successfully with the protean giant he strives to master; and moreover there are soft places in his heart and in his head which indicate such an amount of chronic weakness as forces us to the conclusion that literary victories of the first rank are not included in his destiny. At the same time, we by no means deny that his work possesses considerable merit. He writes with the pen of a ready writer; and much of his criticism, though fluent to shallowness, is clear and healthy. He believes in God, and does not consider that genius dispenses a man from the ten commandments. He has an eye for the ludicrous, and can call names on occasion; and he praises and blames with all the earnestness of apparent conviction. But the plan of his work is radically defective, or rather it has no plan at all. To cram more than two centuries and a half of novels and novelists,that is, notices biographical and critical of a class of writers the most numerous and prolific of any, within the scanty compass of two small octavo volumes, was an impossible task to begin with. Having, however, such a limit assigned to him, the proper course would have been to have confined extended notices to "representative" men and women, and to have devoted merely a couple of lines to each unit of the undistinguished crowd. This might have been unfaithful to the promise of the title; but the discrepancy would have been, after all, a pardonable one. Catchpenny titles are booksellers' baits. Instead of adopting such a course, Mr. Jeaffreson begins on a scale which would have quadrupled the size of his work; and giving twenty-one authors something like elbowroom in his first volume, squeezes eighty-eight into the narrow bounds of his second, where they lie packed closer than herrings in a barrel. And with all this packing and squeezing, he leaves out fish of first-rate quality, and suffers worthless shads to fill the place of genuine bloaters. We are utterly at a loss to discover what principle of selection guided him. Surely Rasselas entitles Dr. Johnson, for example, to men*Novels and Novelists from Elizabeth to Victoria. freson.

--

By J. Cordy Jeaf

tion among the Georgian tale-constructors. In modern days. the omissions are still more remarkable. Miss Emilia Marryat is duly chronicled as authoress; but he who wrote Peter Simple, Jacob Faithful, and Japhet in search of a Father (cum multis aliis), has no place. Yet Captain Marryat was the founder of a school; and his hearty and genuine merriment, his irrepressible fun and dash, have shaken, and will continue to shake, thousands of sides with contagious laughter. A humorist of a totally different calibre, with his strange power of moving to simultaneous smiles and burning tears, was Thomas Hood. Tylney Hall may have been a failure, but no list of novelists is complete without the name of Hood the poet. Who,-not to leave the humorists,-who has not roared over Hajji Baba? yet some drivelling scribbler occupies the place of Morier in Mr. Jeaffreson's miscellany. Neither is any mention made of Tom- Cringle Scott, whose novel stands unrivalled in force of dramatie incident, in warmth and fulness of local colouring, and in accuracy of description of a society which time and emancipation have swept from the fervid islands where wealthy planters once flourished, and pirates found concealment. It is hard, too, on Horace Smith and Gerald Griffin, that they should be deemed unworthy of a niche in the temple of fame, while tablets are erected to Constantine Henry Phipps, Marquis of Normanby, and Miss Marguerite A. Power. The popularity of Ellen Middleton and Grantley Manor should have ensured a place for Lady Georgiana Fullerton; and the exclusion of Jerrold père can be explained on no theory of forgetfulness, seeing that the existence of that "celebrated father” is alluded to in the halfpage liberally devoted to Jerrold fils. It will, we think, be admitted without further proof that our author's faults of omission are neither few nor trivial. In what he has done there is also much to condemn and something to praise.

An introductory chapter of the most meagre and unsatisfactory character is followed by a notice of Robert Greene, who does duty as the sole representative of the Elizabethan novelists. Considering the space at his disposal, Mr. Jeaffreson was perhaps right in cutting the euphuists very short; they were Îong enough, and dreary enough, in their day; but in a history of novels they cannot be passed over with such slender notice. From the Elizabethan we jump to the Caroline romancers; and these are represented only by Margaret Duchess of Newcastle and Mrs. Afra Behn, silly propriety and silly impropriety. The absurdities of the philosophical duchess are amusingly trotted out; and the story of Mrs. Behn, the merchant's widow, who wrote loose novels and looser plays

(not differing in that particular from all the literary efforts in the same line of her contemporaries), is not ill told. But thirty-six pages were far too many to give up to these lady scribblers; though the first was hailed by university rectors as illustrissima princeps ingenii, and likened to Aspasia, Zenobia, and all the blue heroines of antiquity; and the second able to hold her own against the prurient wits of the Restoration in defence of her position that "whatever it is right for you men to do, it is right for me to attempt." Thus novels and novelists from Elizabeth to Charles II. are quickly disposed of to Mr. Jeaffreson's satisfaction, if not to that of his readers.

The reign of the last Stuart is illustrated by Defoe and the very profligate De la Rivière, whose virtues are thus vouched by Dean Swift: "Poor Mrs. Manley (De la Rivière) the author is very ill of a dropsy and sore leg: the printer tells me he is afraid she cannot live long. I am heartily sorry for her she has very generous principles for one of her sort, and a great deal of good sense and invention."

Then follow in rapid succession Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Madame d'Arblay, Mary Wolstonecraft, Godwin, Beckford, and some halfdozen others to fill in crevices. These complete the first volume. There is a healthy tone in most of the biographical sketches which is highly to be commended in these days of sickly sentimentality and cynical philosophy; but they have no originality of treatment, and are mere compilations, and hasty ones, from the materials closest at hand. The critical notices vary very much in character. Many are acute and suggestive; but in all we find marks of insufficient deliberation, a want of system and coherence which entirely enfeebles the power of the critic, who delivers perhaps a well-aimed stroke enough, but fails, from want of muscle, to inflict any thing beyond a flesh-wound, or maybe a scratch. And, as in the case of Mrs. Behn, Mr. Jeaffreson has sadly mismanaged his space. No less than twenty-seven pages are devoted to Madame d'Arblay, whose twaddling Evelina might well have been dismissed in a couple.

On commencing the herring-barrel, the second volume, we have to repeat the same censure. Lady Blessington absorbs actually thirty pages; while (to say nothing of the enormous omissions to which we have already adverted) Ainsworth, G. P. R. James, Grattan, and Mrs. Hall, are snubbed into half a page each. As might be expected, however, the author has spent his principal strength on the great names among contemporary tale-writers; and on turning to Bulwer,