A Posthumous work of Joseph Balmas,—(the celebrated Spanish priest, whose book on Catholicism and Protestantism has lately been translated, and published in Baltimore, and who perished prematurely in 1848), has just been published. It is entitled Escritos Posthumos, Poesias Posthumos, and contains prose and verse on science, literature, and politics.
The Death of the late Mrs. Bell Martin, at the Union Place Hotel, in this city, was briefly noticed in the last number of the International. It appears from a statement in the London Times that the vast estates known as the Connemara property, to which she had succeeded as the daughter and heiress of the late Mr. Thomas Martin, of Ballinahinch Castle, in Galway, was among the first brought into the new "Encumbered Estates Court," and has been for some months advertised for sale. The Dublin Evening Mail has the following remarks upon the melancholy history of Mrs. Martin, whose novel of "Julia Howard" must preserve for her a very distinguished rank among the literary women, of our time:
"The vicissitudes of life have seldom produced a sadder or more rapid reverse than that by which the fortunes of this excellent lady were darkened and overthrown. Born to a noble inheritance which extended over a territory far exceeding the domain of many a reigning German prince, her name was known throughout the United Kingdom as that of "the Irish heiress." Five years ago her expectancy was considered to be equivalent, over and above all encumbrances and liabilities, to a yearly income of 5,000l. Before two years of the interval had elapsed she found herself at the head of her patrimonial estates, without a shilling that she could call her own. The failure of the potato crop, the famine and pestilence which followed, the scourging laws enacted and enforced by an ignorant Legislature to redress the calamity, and the claims of money-lenders, swept every inch of property from under her feet. Her hopes and her prospects were for ever blighted. Her projects for the improvement of the wild district over which she had reigned as a sort of native sovereign were at an end; and she went forth from the roof of her fathers as a wanderer, without a home, and, as it would almost appear, without a friend. Never was hard fate less deserved; for her untiring and active benevolence had been devoted from her childhood to the comfort and relief of those who suffered, and her powerful and original mind was incessantly employed in devising means of moral and physical amelioration in the condition of the tenantry on her father's estates. She gave up her whole time to such pursuits, avoiding the haunts of fashion and those amusements which might be considered suitable to her age and place, that she might perform the various duties of physician, almoner, schoolmistress, and agricultural instructor. Her almost daily habit was to visit the poor and the sick in the remote recesses of that wild region, sometimes on foot—more frequently in her little boat, well provided with medicaments and food, which she impelled by the vigor of her own arm through the lakes which stretch along the foot of the mountains. How grievous it is to reflect that she should so soon have been driven across the ocean in search of a place to lay her head. The American editor intimates that the object of her voyage was to collect materials for literary works. We have no doubt that such was among her projects; for she was a very distinguished writer, and would by no means eat the bread of idleness or dependence; but there is reason to believe that it was a more stringent compulsion which obliged her, at an advanced period of the year, and in a peculiarly delicate situation, when even peasants remain on shore, to encounter the tedium and perils of a voyage in a sailing vessel. We have heard, in fact, from a quarter which ought to be correctly informed, that she was proceeding to the residence of a near relative of her father, with the intention of remaining there till some favorable change might come over the color of her life."
Our countrywoman, Mrs. Mowatt, has revised and partially rewritten her novels of "The Fortune Hunter," and "Evelyn, or the Heart Unmasked," and they have just been published in London. The Athenæum says of them:
"These tales give us a higher idea of Mrs. Mowatt's talents as an authoress, than her plays did. Taken in conjunction with those dramas, and with the pleasing powers as an actress displayed by the lady,—they not only establish a case of more than common versatility, but indicate that with labor and concentration, so gifted a person might have taken a high place, whether on the library shelf or on the stage. In another point of view, they are less agreeable. Alas, for those primitive souls, who with a perverse constancy may still wish to fancy America a vast New-England of simple manners and superior morals! The society which Mrs. Mowatt describes—whether in 'Evelyn,' which begins with a wedding out of Fleecer's boarding-house, or in 'The Fortune Hunter,' which opens with table-talk at Delmonico's—is as sophisticated as any society under which this wicked old world groans, and which our Sir E. Lytton and Mrs. Gore have satirized—or Balzac (to shame the French) has "shown up." Major Pendennis himself could hardly have produced anything more blasé in tone than some of the pictures of 'New-York Society' drawn by this American lady,—drawn, moreover, when the lady was young. Evelyn is married to a rich man, without her heart having any thing to say in the matter,—by a mother who is a superfine Mrs. Falcon:—and wretched mischief comes of it. Brainard, the fortune hunter, is a heartless and cynical illustration that a Broadway hunter can be as unblushingly mercenary, and as genteelly dishonorable as the veriest old Bond Street hack, bred up in the traditions of the Regency, who ever began life on nothing and a showy person—continued it on nothing and the reputation of fashion—and ended no one cares how or where. There are character, smartness and passion in both these tales—though a certain looseness of structure and incompleteness of style prevent us from being extreme in praising them, or from recommending them by quotation,—and though, as has been said, the tone and taste of the life which they describe must jar on the feelings of those who are unwilling to see the decrepitude of elderly civilization coming down upon a new country, ere its maturity has been reached—or even ere its youth has been sufficiently and steadily trained."
Mrs. Southworth, the authoress of "Retribution," "The Deserted Wife," &c., has a new novel in the press of the Appletons, entitled "Shannondale." Mrs. Southworth is the most popular of our female novelists, notwithstanding the doubtful morality of her works.