though he is not good to me; and I hate every one that hates him; and I will not consent to live as you live here, however good you may pretend to be.'

"But, Miss Rhoda,' said I, what ails you at the way we live here?'

“‘It is not living at all,' said the poor bairn. 'I never can do any. thing very well when I try; but I always want to be something great. I cannot exist and vegetate as you quiet people do. What is the good of your lives to you? I am sure I cannot tell; but it will kill me.'

"You have never tried it, my dear,' said I; so whether it will kill you or no, you can very ill ken. But tell me how you would like to be great.'

"Why should I speak of such things? You would not understand me,' said Rhoda. 'I would like to be a great writer, or a great painter, or a great musician,-though I never would be a servant to the common people, and perform upon a stage. I know I could do something,-indeed, indeed, I know it! And you would have me take prim walks, and do needlework, and talk about schools and stuff, and visit old women. Such things are not for me.'

"Such things have been fit work for many a saint in heaven, my dear,' said I; but truly I ken no call that has been made upon you, either for one thing or another. Great folk, so far as I have heard, are mostly very well pleased with the common turns of this life to rest themselves withal; and truly it is my thought, that the greater a person is, the less he will disdain a quiet life, and kindness, and charity. But it has never been forbidden you, Miss Rhoda, to take your pleasure; and I wot well it never will be.'"

This surely is powerful writing,-so entirely worthy of Mrs Margaret Maitland, that we know not whether we could quite equal it by any extract of the same length from her former work. There is much quiet power, too, in the sketches given of external nature in the present volumes, and much originality of observation. We know not that we ever before met in books with what we may term the echo of that peculiar sound characteristic of a furzy moor under a hot sun which is so well described as in the following passage. All our readers must remember the incessant crack, crack, crack," which they have so often heard when the sun was hot and high, mingling, amid the long broom or prickly

whins, with the chirp of the grasshopper and the hum of the bee.

"Now, we had scarce ended our converse, when, looking out at the end window, I saw Rhoda coming her lane along the road; and, seeing she might be solitary in her own spirit among such a meeting of near friends, I went out to the door to bring her in myself. It was a very bonny day, as I have said, and the bairns being round upon the lawn at the other side, there was but a far-off sound of their voices, and everything else as quiet as it could be under the broad, warm, basking sun,so quiet, that you heard the crack of the seed husks on a great bush of gorse near at hand,- -a sound that ever puts me in mind of moorland places, and of the very heart and heat of sunny days. Rhoda, poor bairn, was in very deep black, as it behoved her to be, and was coming in a kind of wandering thoughtful way her lane down the bright sandy road, and below the broad branches of the chestnut trees, that scarce had a rustle in them, so little air was abroad; and the bit crush of her foot upon the sand was like to a louder echo of the whins, and made a very strange kind of harmony in the quietness."

This wholesome and very interesting novel is calculated to exert a salutary influence, and to yield, besides, much pleasure in the perusal. Like all the other works of its authoress, it is thoroughly truthful; there is no exaggeration of character or incident; events such as it narrates occur in real life; and the men and women which it portrays may be met in ordinary society, though the better ones are unluckily not very common. And yet a wild romance, full of all sorts of marvels and monstrosities, could scarce amuse so much even a youthful reader, far less readers of sober years. In nothing, however, has the work more merit than in its representations of the religious character. Here, also, there is no exaggeration. The natural temperament is exhibited as exerting its inevitable influence. Rhoda's halfsister, Grace, for instance, though one of the excellent, is not at all so loveable a person as Mrs Margaret, just because in her, religion was set on what was originally a more wilful and less loving nature; and we find this thoroughly truthful distinction maintained throughout. In short, this latest pro

duction of Mrs Margaret Maitland is a book which may be safely placed in any hands; and, seeing that novels must and will exist, and must and will exercise prodigious influence, whether the religious world give its consent or no, we think the good people should by all means try whether they cannot conscientiously patronize the good ones.-January 12, 1856.

EUGENE SUE.

Ir is not from the formal histories of a country, as history has hitherto been written, that the manners and morals of its people may best be learnt. Its works of fiction, if they have been produced by the hand of a master, and have dealt with the aspects of contemporary society, are vastly more true to the lineaments of its internal life than its works of sober fact. Smollett's "History of the Reign of George II." is a dull record, that bears on its weary series of numbered paragraphs no distinguishable impress of the character of the age; whereas Smollett's "Humphrey Clinker" is one of the most admirable pictures of English society during that reign which anywhere exists. The severe history, with all its accuracy of names and dates, wants truth; the amusing novel, that seems but to play with ideal characters, is, in all its multitudinous lights and shadows, a true portraiture of the time. And the rule seems general. Does the student wish to acquaint himself with the aspect of English society in the days of our great grandfathers ?-he will gain wonderfully little by poring over heavy sections in the "Annual Registers" of Dodsley, but a very great deal in the study of the graphic sketches of Richardson and Fielding. The "Waverley" of Scott is truer beyond comparison to the real merits of the

Rebellion of 1745 than the authentic history of Home, though Home was himself an actor in many of the scenes which he describes.

It is partly at least from a consideration of this kind that we have placed at the head of our article the name of one of the most popular French novelists of the present day,—a writer whose fictions have been introduced nearly as extensively to the people of London, through the medium of cheap translations, as to those of Paris in the original French, and which are widely circulated over the Continent generally. His novels, with all their extravagancies, give a striking picture of the state of society among at least the city-reared masses of France, and are singularly efficient vehicles in spreading over Europe the contagion of their principles. We find in them more of the philosophy of the late movement in Switzerland against the Jesuits, though they contain not a single allusion to that event, than in any of the narratives of the outbreak which we have yet seen. They serve to show how opinion among the anti-Jesuit party came first to be formed, -the nature, too, of that opinion, and how it happens that they are not merely an anti-Jesuit, but also an anti-evangelistic and anti-tolerant party. Their views and principles are exactly those of Eugene Sue; and their numbers bid fair to increase over Europe, wherever the influence of his writings shall be found to prevail. But a brief sketch of some of the leading characters in one of his latest and most characteristic works, the "Wandering Jew," of which we perceive a cheap English translation has just appeared,—may better serve to show what his fictions teach, than a general reference to their tendency or effects. Rome, in the course of its history, has been signally damaged by two great revolutions in religious opinion, the Reformation of Luther, and the great revolt of Voltaire. The revived Christianity of the New Testament was the formidable antagonist with which it had to deal in

the one case, and a singularly enthusiastic and fanatical infidelity the enemy with which it had to contend in the other; and, for a time, the injury which it received seemed in both cases equally severe. But they were in reality very different in their nature. The wound dealt by infidelity was a flesh wound, and soon healed; whereas the blow dealt by the revived Christianity amputated the members on which it took effect, and separated them for ever from the maimed and truncated carcase. Infidelity dips its idle bucket into the sea of superstition, and labours to create a chasm, where, in the nature of things, no chasm can exist; there is a momentary hollow formed, but the currents come rushing in from every side, and fill it up. But Evangelism not only scoops out the hollow, but also occupies it, leaving no vacuum for aught else to flow in. France, in less than an age after the canonization of her atheists, had again become Popish ;the tides flowed in, and the vacuum was annihilated: whereas evangelistic Scotland is as little Popish now as she was two centuries ago; for in her that perilous space which must be occupied either by religion or superstition was thoroughly filled by the doctrines of the New Testament. The remark bears very directly on the nature of the warfare waged on Rome and the Jesuits by Eugene Sue. His labours, like those of Voltaire, serve but to create a vacuum, abhorrent to the nature of man.

The chief group in his recent novel, round which all its other groupes are made to revolve, and on whose designs their destiny is made to hang, is the Society of the Jesuits. We see them pursuing their schemes of ambition and aggrandisement, undeterred by any sense of justice, and without any feeling of pity or remorse. And the picture, we are afraid, is scarce exaggerated. As exhibited in this work of fiction, there is no part of it so black as to be without its counterpart in real history. There are two grand circumstances