II. WRITERS OF NOVELS AND TALES.

Miss Mitford.

Mary Russell Mitford, 1786-1855, is among the best writers of tales descriptive of English country life and character.

Miss Mitford was the daughter of an English physician of extravagant habits, who dissipated several fortunes, and finally became a helpless burden upon the hands of his young daughter.

Miss Mitford evinced early in life a fondness for letters. Poetry was her favorite, but she was forced, as she herself narrates, to turn aside to the every-day but more lucrative path of prose. Her earlier works are not without their merits, but chiefly as indicating her future excellence.

Publications. - In 1819 appeared, in the Lady's Magazine, Our Village, a series of delightful sketches of English rural life, which met with a very warm reception and established the author's reputation. Between this time and 1828, Miss Mitford published several tragedies, which were acted with success. Among them were: Rienzi, The Foscari, Julian. Also a volume of Sonnets and Poems. These were followed by American Tales; American Tales for Children; Belford Regis, or. Sketches of a Country Town; Country Stories; and Atherton, a tale of Country Life. Upon the whole, Miss Mitford succeeds best as a describer of English country life and character. Her sketches are drawn from nature itself, and have an air of the most charming reality. No books of the kind are more thoroughly enjoyable by old and young. They have outlived nearly all the fashionable novels, their great contemporaries, and entered into the permanent treasure-house of English literature.

Amelia Opie.

AMELIA OPIE, 1769-1853, is widely knownMiss Edgeworth - for her popular Tales.

almost as widely as

Mrs. Opie was the daughter of James Alderson, an English physician. She was married, in 1798, to the distinguished painter, James Opie.

Her principal works are Father and Daughter, Adeline Mowbray, and Madeline, She wrote also a collection of shorter pieces, prominent among which are The Black Velvet Pelisse and The Ruffian Boy, and a series of stories to illustrate the evil consequences of lying. Her occasional poems are but little read.

Mrs. Opie's fame as a novelist has diminished considerably of late years. In no sense can she be considered a creator of character. Her personages are not marked, the plot of the story is weak, and the moral purpose throughout is too palpable. Her strength lies in her power to dissect morbid conditions and passions of the human heart.

Lady Morgan.

LADY SYDNEY MORGAN, 1789-1859, was in her day one of the leading celebrities of the literary world. She was chiefly known by her novels and her works of travel.

Lady Morgan was the daughter of Owenson, an actor at the Royal Theatre, Dublin. By her success as a novelist, she gained admission into fashionable society. In 1812 she married Sir Thomas Charles Morgan. Much of Lady Morgan's married life was passed in travel upon the continent.

Her published works are very numerous, chiefly novels and books of travel. The most popular of her novels are The Wild Irish Girl, and O'Donnel. Woman, or Ida of Athens, is noted as having furnished the occasion for one of Gifford's most ferocious reviews in the London Quarterly. Her two most celebrated works of travel are entitled respectively France and Italy. They are still interesting, and were read with avidity at the time of their appearance, although Gifford kept up his fulminations against the authoress.

Lady Morgan's style is sprightly, and her descriptions successful, but she was wholly incompetent to deal with the graver problems of life, such as she has touched upon in Woman.

JOHN BANIM, 1800-1842, an Irish novelist, is celebrated for his vivid descriptions of peasant life in Ireland.

His works are numerous: Tales of the O'Hara Family, 12 series; Croppy, a Tale of 1798; Anglo-Irish of the 19th Century; The Denounced; Father Connell; Bit O'Writin; Boyne Water; Crohoore of the Bill-hook; Ghost-Hunter and his Family; John Doe; Mayor of Wind-Gap; Nowlans; Smuggler. He wrote also the Tragedy of Damon and Pythias. "The Ghost-Hunter and his Family, The Mayor of Wind-Gap, and several other works, are proofs of Mr. Banim's remarkable talent of eliciting the interest and sympathies of his reader. Fault has been found with him on the ground that there is throughout the whole of his writings a sort of overstrained excitement, a wilful dwelling upon turbulent and unchastened passions, which, as it is a vice most incident to the workings of real genius, more especially of Irish genius, so perhaps it is one which meets with least mercy from well-behaved, prosaic people." - Westminster Review.

LADY CHARLOTTE BURY, 1775-1861, originally Campbell, of the Argyle family, was celebrated equally for her personal beauty and for her passion for elegant letters. She was ambitious also of being lady patroness to men of letters, and was one of the first to recognize the rising greatness of Walter Scott. She had a place in the household of Queen Charlotte, and is the reputed authoress of The Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV. The work was attributed to her ladyship by Brougham, who reviewed it with great severity. She published several novels: Alla Gioruata; The Devoted; The Disinherited and the Ensnared; Family Records; Flirtation; Separation.

ELLEN PICKERING, 1843, was considered in her day as the head of the Circulating Library school of novelists. The following is a list of her principal works: The Heiress, Agnes Searle, The Merchant's Daughter, The Squire, The Fright, The Prince and Pedlar, The Quiet Husband, Who Shall be Heir? The Secret Foe, The Expectant, and several others. She wrote also Charades for Acting, and Proverbs for Acting.

Captain Marryat.

FREDERICK MARRYAT, 1792-1848, captain in the Royal Navy, and an able officer as well as writer, is universally considered the best delineator of naval life and adventure.

Marryat's works, which are exceedingly numerous, are widely read in England and America. The principal of them are: The King's Own; The Pacha of Many Tales; Midshipman Easy; Japhet in Search of a Father; Peter Simple; Jacob Faithful; The Phantom Ship.

Besides his strictly nautical novels, Captain Marryat wrote several novels and sketches descriptive of American life in the West, such as Valerie, and The Narrative of Monsieur Violet, and also A Diary in America. During the latter part of his life Marryat published a number of stories for the young, such as Masterman Ready, The Children of the New Forest, etc.

As a writer upon American manners, Captain Marryat, like nearly all his countrymen of twenty or thirty years ago, is decidedly prejudiced, but is far from being the worst example of the class. It is only when he moves among scenes and persons thoroughly English that he displays his powers to the best advantage. His descriptions of incident and character are easy and vigorous, and extremely droll. The best of his works is perhaps Midshipman Easy, and the description of the great triangular duel by the boatswain, the purser, and the midshipman is inimitable. It must be observed, however, that in all Marryat's works there is a slight tinge of vulgarity, the besetting sin of class-writers, from which his great rival, Lever, has escaped. Marryat has produced many fascinating novels, but he has created nothing that can be placed by the side of Mickey Free, or Major Monsoon.

WILLIAM HAMILTON MAXWELL, 1794-1850, a native of Ireland, and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, is the author of many novels and sketches, chiefly of an amusing character. He may be said to have started, by his Stories of Waterloo, the military novel, which has since proved such a rich field for subsequent writers. His principal works are: Stories of Waterloo; Wild Sports of the West (of Ireland); Life of the Duke of Wellington; Victories of the British Army; Adventures of Captain O'Sullivan; Bryan O'Lynn.

Mr. Borrow was born at Norwich, England. He had a natural turn for acquiring by the ear a knowledge of living languages, and had in this way acquired, among other languages, a knowledge of that spoken by the Gypsies, and with it a great deal of curious information in regard to that singular people. Mr. Borrow seems to have been a sort of Gypsy himself, so far as an irrepressible love of wandering and adventure is concerned; and he was employed, with wonderful success, in circulating the Bible in Spain at a time when no other agency seemed capable of doing the work. His works, partly fictitious, and partly autobiographical, giving an account of his labors in Bible distribution and of his adventures among the Gypsies, are exceedingly entertaining, and have been very popular. The titles of his principal works are: The Bible in Spain, 3 vols; Zincali, an Account of the Gypsies in Spain, 2 vols.; Lavengro, the Scholar, the Gypsy, and the Priest, 3 vols.; Romany Rye, a Sequel to Lavengro; An Autobiography.

Mr. Borrow had the honor of being quoted in Parliament, and by no less a speaker than Sir Robert Peel. Difficulties were they to be deterred from proceeding by difficulties? Let them look at Mr. Borrow; why, if he had suffered himself to be prevented from circulating the Bible in Spain by the difficulties he met with, he could never have spread such enlightenment and information through that country,"

Charlotte Bronté and her Sisters.

Three sisters, daughters of Rev. Patrick Bronté, rose suddenly to fame about the middle of the present century: CHARLOTTE, 18161855, known as Currer Bell;" ANNE, 1820-1849, known as "Acton Bell;" and EMILY, 1819-1848, known as "Ellis Bell."

"Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our names under those of Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell,- the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called 'feminine'-we had a vague impression that authoresses are likely to be looked upon with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward a flattery which is not true praise."

The first publication of the sisters was a joint affair, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Emily, besides her share in the volume just named, wrote Wuthering Heights, a novel of considerable, but very unequal power. Anne wrote also Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall. None of these works, probably, would have attracted much attention, but for their association with those of the older sister.

Charlotte's first separate publication was Jane Eyre, an Autobiography, 1848. It was a work of wonderful power, and it gained immediate and universal popularity. It was followed, in 1849, by Shirley not quite equal to the preceding, but still very able and very popula.. In 1850, after the death of her sisters, she published a Selection of their Literary Remains, with a Biographical notice. Villette, her last and greatest work, came out in 1852, and was received with a universal burst of admiration. In it she not only rose to the level of Jane Eyre, but even went above it. "No one in her time has grasped with such extraordinary force the scenes and circumstances through which her story moved, or thrown so strong an individual life into place and locality. Her passionate and fearless nature, her wild, warm heart, are transferred into the magic world she has created.—a world which no one can enter without yielding to the irresistible fascination of her personal influence."— Blackwood.

About the time of the appearance of Villette, Charlotte was married to her father's curate, Rev. Arthur B. Nicholls, but died after a brief period of domestic happiness. The biography of Charlotte Bronté by Mrs. Gaskell is itself a book of intense interest, and is the best commentary on her novels.

REV. PATRICK BRONTË, 1774–1861, the father of Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, published, in 1811, a volume, Cottage Poems.

III. WRITERS ON LITERATURE, POLITICS, AND

SCIENCE.

Sydney Smith.

Sydney Smith, 1771-1845, the witty Canon of St. Paul's, was on the whole the ablest and most effective of that small

band of writers who in the early part of this century made the Edinburgh Review a power in the world.

Sydney Smith studied at Winchester and at Oxford, took orders in the Church of England, and became finally Canon of St. Paul's. His name has become the synonym for wit and humor. It is not so generally known, however, that his more solid qualities of judgment and taste were equally prominent.

Smith's wit was of the highest order, the wit which results from a keen, intuitive perception of right and wrong, not degenerating into bitterness and rancor, but poised by strong good sense and healthy self-activity. He differs from Lamb in having less humor, and a less delicate play of fancy. Lamb's whimsicalities are those of a recluse who lives to himself and his books, and loiters through the world with halfclosed eyes; Smith walks briskly through the great Vanity Fair with eyes wide open and a jest at his tongue's end for every folly. Many of Smith's sayings and repartees have become proverbial, such as the one in which he characterizes Macaulay's conversation as enlivened by brilliant flashes of silence.

Sydney Smith was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, and he wrote for that periodical many of its most brilliant articles on politics, literature, and philosophy.

His most celebrated series of writings was his Letters on the Subject of the Catho lics, to my Brother Abraham who lives in the Country. These Letters, appearing during the times of agitation which preceded the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill, exhibited the author's full powers of wit, sarcasm, and solid reasoning, and summed up the case for Emancipation so ably as to leave nothing to be said on the other side.

Several volumes of his Sermons have been published; they show that Smith was no less able as a preacher than as a writer. Many of these sermons bear directly upon the Emancipation controversy.

His Letters on American Debts, written for the Morning Chronicle, were occasioned by his loss of money invested in Pennsylvania State loans. Their tone is somewhat unfair, and is deplorably bitter, the more so since Smith's loss was not heavy. As a matter of principle, however, the legislative repudiation of those days deserved all the scorn and denunciation that it received,

Sydney Smith's Memoirs, published by his daughter, Lady Holland, is a most interesting biography, revealing to us both the public and domestic life of one of the shrewdest and most admirable of writers, husbands, and fathers.

It may be said of Smith's wit that it is always good, and never vulgar. A collection of his sayings has been made, under the title of Wit and Wisdom of Sydney Smith. Among the hundreds of brilliant remarks here brought together, there is not one soiled by impurity, vulgarity, or profanity.

LADY HOLLAND. (Miss) Saba Smith, afterwards Lady Holland, 1867, eldest daughter of the Rev. Sydney Smith, was married, in 1834, to Henry Holland, who was physician-in-ordinary to Prince Albert and knighted in 1853 by Queen Victoria. Lady Holland has won for herself a lasting name by her one work, the Memoir of her father Sydney Smith, one of the most delightful and best-told personal narratives in the language.