But when we pass from the fictitious historian of the outer world to the regions of what Mr. Disraeli has called 'psycho'logical romance,' and to the delineation of character not as manifested in acts but as developed by mental processes, the case is altogether different. Here we are entirely at the mercy of the ingenious author. We have no canon for the distances of thought, no gauge for the depths of the imagination; when the moods of our own temperament do not understand one another, how can we judge with precision of other natures and of other minds? We cannot take our own experience as the standard, for we know not how we should have thought or felt under such various circumstances; nor can we predicate that our own faculties might not, under sufficient pressure, have been disturbed or distorted in any degree, or in any direction, that the writer may choose to depict. Our sympathy with such a book will, no doubt, mainly depend on the truthful representation of emotions we recognise in ourselves, of thoughts that have arisen in our own minds when in analogous positions, of moral dangers to which we have ourselves been exposed, of internal struggles in which we ourselves have contended; but still we are able also to comprehend more than we have known, and to enjoy the description of intellectual and spiritual operations the most remote from anything that has come to pass within ourselves.

Such observations especially apply to a class of writings with which our literature is now familiar, where the narrator is free to range not only through the ordinary phenomena of perception and sensation, but through the mysterious world of religious ideas. There he can make his characters subject to what influences he pleases, and those influences the sources of whatever actions it suits him to devise. He can attach any moral con clusions he chooses to any religious convictions he prefers; the wonders of the heart of man make any and every delineation credible; no consistency of conduct, no familiar sequence of events, are required; the conditions of our moral nature, the force of habit, the laws of conscience, may be superseded by supernatural machinery, more marvellous than that of Genius or Fairy, and yet indisputably possible in an order of things where the most hardened criminal may be converted in a moment, and the most devout enthusiast become deceiver or self-deceived. With such weapons as these in his armoury, much discretion in the use of them may well be demanded of the author of a religious novel.

As long, indeed, as he contents himself with asserting or

defending his own positions, there can be little to complain of. If to ordinary readers his incidents appear to be improbable, or his thesis to be crudely stated, or his deductions to be extravagant, his book will only find favour with those whose sympathetic experience may over-rule such objections; if, on the contrary, his theory is gracefully interwoven with his tale, and his opinions not roughly intruded on the reader but fairly evolved from the characters and situations, the interest will extend beyond mere theological associations, and the writer may hope, if not to convince, at least to propitiate, those who may be opposed to his peculiarities of doctrine.

There are many sensible persons to whom all religious fiction is essentially repulsive: the language of poetry itself appears to them presumptuous in its attempt to convey the grandeur of religious ideas, and any other treatment but the plain narration of fact or the serious methods of argument or persuasion appears ill-suited to the expression of feelings connected with the problem of the destiny of the soul of man. They conceive that fancy may innocently deal with the varied conditions of this life and the affections and passions which ornament or deform it, but that if she be permitted to interfere with our moral and spiritual relations to the invisible world there is great danger of weakening the sense of religious realities, and of substituting a vague imaginativeness for earnest and practical belief. To this it has been replied that the objection if fairly urged would extend to all works of fiction whatever, for the religious man would be the last to desire to exclude the action of religious motives and principles from anything that professed to be a true representation of human life. We do not allude to this controversy with the hope of leading it to any conclusion, but only to suggest that its very existence enforces the duty of bringing religious fiction into harmony with the sacred principles upon which it rests. If we are to have novels about Christianity, let them be written in a truly Christian spirit; if we are to have sketches of religious life, let them be drawn in a temper of religious reverence; for with all the licence the range of the subject affords, and with the temptation to misrepresent and misinterpret the opinions of others to which we are all liable,—and not the less so when conscious of the sincerity of our own,-if a man permits himself to make religious fiction a vehicle of controversy or even of satire, he is in peril not only of committing gross injustice, but of exhibiting and encouraging the mockery of the very sentiments and principles which he most desires to recommend to the respect of mankind.

But

It is now some years since a very subtle dialectician, who holds a prominent place in the theological history of his country, becoming conscious of the insecurity of the foundation on which he had induced many good and able men to rest their faith, and regarding with complacency for himself the proximate refuge of an infallible Church, drew with a masterly hand a picture of the divisions and difficulties of Protestantism, of the emptiness and discomfort of all forms of private judgment, and, after exhausting every phase of independent belief, left his bewildered reader to choose between Atheism and Rome. Here in some sort the end justified the means; every step that sunk, beneath the foot of the aspirant only served to guide him to the support and defence which at his will he could grasp and feel secure. notwithstanding this possible vindication, the book was painful to every honest man; for it argued no tender conscience and no gentle heart in the teacher who could thus lay bare the vanity of doctrines which he had once taught and believed,-who could regard with this contemptuous pity the passionate prayers and earnest yearning after truth of his former self and of other pious men, and could expose with a malicious pleasure the fluctuations and turmoil of the deep human soul. In the volumes before us, we recognise much of the tone and spirit of The 'Loss and Gain' of Mr. Newman, without the logical conclusion that might palliate the harmfulness of that production. They are the work of a scholar and a practised writer, not, indeed, experienced in dealing with fictitious characters or in devising an ingenious fable, but familiar with speculation and controversy, capable of presenting his own views in a clear and commanding style, and of depicting the opinions of others with a coarse humour which insinuates more than it asserts, and at the same time leaves on the uncritical reader an impression of heartiness and simplicity.

A finer sense of this faculty would have prevented the insertion of many stories which strike us as old friends not improved by a new dress. We have all heard of the charityschool-boy who, when asked if he had been baptized, said he did not remember, but that he had certainly been vaccinated,' but we never expected to find in any Art of Pluck' that such a question or answer had passed in an examination for an Oxford degree. It has been amusingly related of a Newmarket trainer that he was so confused with the nomenclature of the horses entrusted to his care, that he called Alcides Allsides, and when set right, balanced the blunder by designating Ironsides Ironsi-des; but whatever small fun there may be in this anecdote is entirely lost in its adaptation to a pedantic college-fellow who

loses the favour of his lady-love by pronouncing Walter Scott's Dumbydikes in a classical fashion.

We would not, however, reproach with these small defects an author whose evident imitations of popular writers show he is not conscious of any peculiar originality in this line of literature, did they not illustrate the want of delicate tact, of which this work offers many other and more important examples. It appears that the object of this Tale of the Times' is to show by what means certain persons are 'perverted' from the right way, and what are the consequences of such perversion to themselves and to others. Now this right way, from which whoever deviates is a pervert,' is a temperate and reasonable form of practical Christianity, which the writer believes to be all-sufficient for all varieties of mankind under all conditions, physical or metaphysical, and which every living man must be content with, unless he is a rascal or a fool. We have no word to say against the theological system which all who are not perverted' are here bound to adopt as their rule of life and thought. It is moderate Church-of-Englandism, free from scepticism on one hand and fanaticism on the other, more evangelical than Paley, and less liberal than Arnold; such a religion, in fact, as thousands of conscientious Englishmen have found to be their daily happiness and their eternal hope. It would be a perfectly legitimate object for a religious fiction to show how men are led away from such a blessing, and how they may be led back to it; and though the problem is a somewhat abstruse one (seeing that it involves all the reasons why Christianity has not got possession of the world in eighteen hundred years), yet the attempt has been frequently made with more or less suc

cess.

But the perverts' in this book consist of a young man and a young woman, who grow up without religious faith simply from the cause that there is nothing either in their family life, or in the rest of the world with which they come in contact, to teach it them. Unless it is assumed that every well-born Englishman or Englishwoman is naturally a good Christian,—as the Abbè Lamennais said somewhere that every Gallican thought he had nothing to do but to present a French passport to St. Peter at the door of heaven,--the moral of this work is unintelligible; or else the hero and heroine must have been the subject of some special Providence, first to have acquired and secondly to have retained any sound religious notions whatever. The boy has no father, a selfish, worldly, foolish mother, a brutalising school-education, a crazy German tutor; as he grows up the current religion presents itself to him in one form more dis

gusting and absurd than another; he becomes a member of a society whose sole object is to combine debauchery with infidelity, and, as if this were not enough, he is haunted from his very childhood by a Mephistopheles of the newest fashion, a gentleman of gigantic abilities, universal knowledge, grand moral faculties employed for the worst objects and the meanest ends, and aided in his diabolical intrigues, not indeed by the supernatural intervention of the witches of the Brocken, but by the infernal machinations of the Mormons of the Great Salt Lake of Utah. In truth, except a few years at Eton, there is no period of this youth's life in which he is not exposed to the most corrupting atmosphere, and the fact that he should preserve so much of his better nature as to be susceptible of religious influences as soon as they appear to him under a reasonable and consistent aspect, and be awakened to a conviction of the truth by one superficial letter of a pious clergyman, would rather prove that there are some men who cannot be perverted than that 'perversion' is the Tale of the Times.'

In the same sense the portraiture and story of Charles Bampton's sister excite no feeling but that of infinite compassion. This character is outlined with a precision and delicacy far superior to anything else in the book, and is a specimen of the powers of the writer, where he allows his talent to work freely, unchecked by some obtrusive moral or invidious application. The dangerous effect of continuous sickness in spoiling the fresh nature of childhood, the self-absorption and self-importance which it induces, and the sense of injury which ensues when improved health restores the patient to the ordinary duties and cares of life, are excellently described, and lead up naturally to the fatal catastrophe of the deceived and deserted woman, when suicide presents itself to her as the preservation of her unborn child from a life of misery and reproach, as well as her sole escape from disgrace and calamity. The letter in which she announces and vindicates her intention recalls and emulates in its pathetic sophistry the conclusion of Werther,' and will undoubtedly shock many persons who may be unwilling to admit an apology on the score of dramatic propriety.

The villain is taken from the most horrific school of the last century skilfully adapted to the nineteenth. His cruelty so tortures and debases our Faust when at school that it requires the contrivance of a change of name, and an incredible alteration of features by a gunshot wound received in a duel, to enable him to act the part of the demon undetected, while at once an Oxford undergraduate and a dignitary of the Mormon Church. There he desolates the souls of the young men about