Expiation. By Mrs. Julia C.R. Dorr, author of "Sibyl Huntington," etc. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
Expiation is an interesting American story, with a background of lonely woods that protect the rustic privacy of Altona, and a list of characters that combine city culture and country eccentricity. Patsy, the grim and self-sacrificing "help," who observes drily of a statue representing Eve with the apple that "some things is decent and some things ain't," is the best delineation in it, but the style is always lively, always feminine and pure, and the conception of the high-bred, aristocratic family, come to bury their mistakes and miseries in a forest seclusion, would have been thought worthy of being worked up by Emily Bronté. The catastrophe, where a dumb nun turns out to be a lost wife given over to the undertakers in a state of catalepsy, is perhaps not quite new, but it is striking and vigorously told, and her union at last with her husband's sons and the girlish bride of one of them is very touching. The novel is full of local American color, and entices the attention from the reader's first plunge to the end.
Wanderings in Spain. By Augustus J.C. Hare, author of "Memorials of a Quiet Life," "Walks in Rome," etc. London: Strahan & Co.; New York: Dodd & Mead.
This companionable book tells you how to travel over the Spanish Peninsula by means of a slight knowledge of the Castilian tongue, a bold infidelity to Murray's Guide, a cake of soap and some Liebig's broth, and a habit of universal politeness. "Pardon me, my sister," said the author to a beggar-woman at Barcelona: "does not your worship see that I am drawing?" "Ah, Dios!" she answered, "blind that I was! worm that I am! So your worship draws? And I—I too am a lover of the arts." On the other hand, a stiff-necked Englishman traveling from Seville to Xeres sent his driver to dine in the kitchen of an inn on the road. The driver, who in his heart thought that he would have been doing great honor to a heretic by sitting at the same table with him, concealed his indignation at the time, but in the middle of the road, three or four leagues from Xeres, in a horrible desert full of bogs and brambles, pushed the Englishman out of the carriage, and cried out as he whipped on his horse, "My lord, you did not find me worthy to sit at your table; and I, Don José Balbino Bustamente y Orozco, find you too bad company to occupy a seat in my carriage. Good-night!" Another story, of time-honored repetition, is here restored to what may possibly have been its true parentage. A gypsy, on his knees to his priest, is tempted by the father's snuffbox and steals it. "Father," he says immediately, "I have one more confession: I accuse myself of stealing a snuffbox." "Then, my son, you must certainly restore it." "Will you have it yourself, my father?" "I? certainly not," answered the confessor. "The fact is," proceeded the gypsy, "that I have offered it to the owner, and he has refused it." "Then you can keep it with a good conscience," answered the father. Such are the glimpses of Spanish character. We could easily bear to have more of them; but the author, accompanied with ladies, and an antiquarian by habit and nature, gives more sketches of ruins, and of landscapes which are usually found "hideous," than of the infinite whims of national manners. His contempt for Spanish landscape appears to us to amount to a disease: he scorns honest Murray for describing Valencia's mud huts as "pearls set in emeralds," and says that O'Shea's eulogy of her as "the sultana of Mediterranean cities" is a glowing picture of what is dismal enough in reality. In fact, we are afraid that Mr. Hare has not exactly the artist's eye, and cannot easily admire a scene in which he is not physically comfortable. But he has rich and heart-warm descriptions of the Alhambra, the Escorial, and the ruins of Poblet near Tarragona, where an order of patrician monks lived in incredible luxury until a time within present memory, when they were scattered by a tumult and their sculptured home crushed into dry and haggard ruin. This book cannot compare with his Walks in Rome, which was the careful record of a familiar and a resident; but it is the result of a very lively curiosity and the record of a mind evidently stored with history and romance. Excepting Colonel Hay's inimitable Castilian Days, it is the best recent book about the country which it skims over.
Marie Derville: A Story of a French Boarding-school. From the French of Madame Guizot de Witt, by Mary G. Wells. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
French fiction when playing off innocence or when intended for uncontaminated ears attains a blank intensity of virtue that our own literature cannot hope to rival. The French "juvenile" still guards that beauteous ignorance of slang or of other small vice which the American schoolboy regards as poverty of resource or incapacity, and which he has put off with his frocks and his Parent's Assistant and his Sanford and Merton. But Marie Derville, when its accent of Berquin is allowed for, is a varied and interesting tale, affording many a glimpse into that country guarded about with such jealous walls—middle-class childhood in France. Marie is the child of a sea-captain who goes to China, disappears for many years, and comes back at last, after a narrow escape from massacre, saying, "How strange it was to find myself on the eve of becoming a martyr—to die for the Christian religion when one is so poor a Christian as I!" His wife and two or three of Marie's grandparents meantime unite to conduct a boarding-school on the sea-shore, the history of which enterprise forms the bulk of the tale. Here the American reader learns with surprise that the French little girl, who is never actually seen otherwise than perfect and doll-like, is really subject in private to a few of the faults common to Miss Edgeworth's heroines, such as selfishness, gluttony and laziness. But the story of the school is on the whole sunshiny and prosperous, and Marie Derville's young readers will follow with delight the career of these prim little beings, so much more governed than themselves, as they go picnicking on the sea-beach for mussels, make flannels for the cholera-patients of a fishing village, or learn to recite the fable of "The Country Rat" without making it all one word in their hurry. The story is very healthy and happy, and the translation excellent.
Books Received.
The Teacher's Companion to the American Drawing-slates and Cards. With Cards. By Walter Smith, Art Master, South Kensington, London, State Director of Art Education in Massachusetts. Boston: Noyes, Holmes & Co.
Keel and Saddle: A Retrospect of Forty Years of Military and Naval Service. By Joseph W. Revere. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.
Helps over Hard Places. For Boys. Second series. By Lynde Palmer. Illustrated. Troy, N.Y.: H.B. Nims & Co.