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This day, in 2 vols. 8vo. cloth extra, price 368.
ISMAILIA:

A NARRATIVE of the EXPEDITION to CENTRAL AFRICA for the SUPPRESSION of the SLAVE TRADE, ORGANISED BY ISMAIL, KHEDIVE OF EGYPT.

BY

SIR SAMUEL W. BAKER,
PACHA, F.R.S. &c.

With a NEW PORTRAIT of the AUTHOR engraved by JEENS,
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FIFTY FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS by Zwecker and Durand.

ATHENEUM.

"This book will add to Sir Samuel Baker's fame........Once more he comes before his fellow countrymen as an explorer, a man of keen intelligence, a sportsman, and one who can do and dare, suffer and wait, and under every circumstance prove himself to be a thorough Englishman. As such a man, we have hitherto been proud of him, and have gloried in his geographical discoveries. But in the present work, especially in the latter portion of it, the heart of the reader is touched as the author, in his previous works, never touched it before."

MORNING POST.

"The account of his efforts, of difficulties and dangers undergone and surmounted, reads more like a romance than like the actual experiences of, comparatively speaking, a mere handful of men. Sir Samuel Baker was evidently the right man in the right place........ The style of the narrative is quite characteristic of the practical nature of the man; it is straight to the point, and free from useless reiteration. The descriptions are never diffuse, yet bright and comprehensive, the whole work being incomparably more entertaining than books of African travel usually are........The narrative abounds in descriptive sketches and anecdotes well and pleasantly told. The book is profusely illustrated, and the clear and admirable maps prefixed to each volume render it an easy task for the reader to follow the track of the expedition."

PALL MALL GAZETTE.

"We cannot praise it higher than by saying it is quite unlike most books of African travel. In other words, it is well written and full of remarkable adventures...... The account of the retreat is masterly, and the battles are described with considerable spirit."

DAILY TELEGRAPH.

"It is a story of the utmost interest, and will take its place among the most remarkable records of British hardihood.......... For our own part we shall not hesitate to affirm that we regard this spirited and simple narrative as an undying honour to English literature, which it enriches with the record of manly and earnest deeds, more eloquent than words."

DAILY NEWS.

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GRAPHIC.

"Everybody, of course, will read 'Ismailïa.'. ......It is the tale of an enterprise unparalleled in its way since the adventurous days of the early travellers, told with no effort at literary effect, but simply and forcibly, just as each incident was noted down in the journals of its leader......The book will long remain a wonderful memorial of British enterprise and daring. Incidentally, too, it contains much to attract or amuse the sportsman and geographer."

By the same Author,

The ALBERT N'YANZA, GREAT BASIN of the NILE, and EXPLORATION of the NILE SOURCES. With numerous Illustrations and Maps. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 68.

The NILE TRIBUTARIES of ABYSSINIA and the SWORD HUNTERS of the HAMRAN ARABS. With numerous Illustrations and Maps. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. 68.

2 vols. 8vo. 25s.

A RAMBLE ROUND the WORLD, 1871. By M. le Baron de HÜBNER, formerly Ambassador and Minister. Translated by Lady HERBERT. [This day. "It is difficult to do ample justice to this pleasant narrative of travel....The translator has admirably preserved the vivid style of the foreign original, especially in the racy, minute manner in which grotesque little details-evincing the keen observer-are rendered into excellent English....The descriptions are wonderfully vivid and well painted..... The work does not contain a single dull paragraph.”—Morning Post.

CAVE-HUNTING: Researches on the Evidence of Caves respecting the Early Inhabitants of Europe. By W. BOYD DAWKINS, M.A. F.R.S. &c., Curator of the Museum, and Lecturer in Geology in the Owens College, Manchester. 8vo. with Coloured Plate and Woodcuts, 218. [This day.

"There is evidence of ripe learning and laborious research.....From chapter to chapter Mr. Dawkins sets forth a series of descriptions well calculated to fascinate those readers, incessantly multiplying in our time, who delight in glancing down the vistas of remote ages, thus illuminated not by abstract speculations, but by undeniable evidence found in the recesses of the mountains and rocks. His manner is not less excellent than his matter is curious, while the illustrations add much to the interest of the book." Standard.

[Part I. crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. this day.

By R. Chenevix Trench, D.D., Archbishop of [New Edition, Revised, extra fcap. 8vo. 7s. 6d. this day.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1874.

LITERATURE

NOVELS OF THE WEEK.

Patricia Kemball By E. Lynn Linton.
3 vols. (Chatto & Windus.)
The Maid of Killeena, and other Stories. By
William Black. (Macmillan & Co.)
Bluebeard's Keys, and other Stories. By Miss
Thackeray. (Smith & Elder.)
Vanessa. By the Author of 'Thomasina.' 2
vols. (H. S. King & Co.)

Mr. Vaughan's Heir. By F. L. Benedict.
3 vols. (Samuel Tinsley.)
The Neglected Question. By B. Markewitch.
by the
(H. S.

Translated from the Russian
Princesses Ouroussoff. 2 vols.
King & Co.)

Henri Rivière.

La Faute du Mari. Par (Paris, Michel Lévy.) THE novels and novelettes which, this week, come before us for review, are above the average. None of them is absolutely bad, unless, perhaps, the Russian story, while Mrs. Linton's volumes have unusually strong points about them: and the collections of tales by Miss Thackeray and Mr. Black, reprints though they be, are welcome even to those who do not habitually read works of fiction.

We have looked with curiosity for the new production of the author of Joshua Davidson.' That book, a socio-political pamphlet in the guise of a story, showed, in spite of some glaring faults, that the author's powers had ripened since her first tales appeared; and in these days when novels are published in such numbers and real novelists are so few, we naturally feel interest in the performances of any one who shows the capacity of rising above the level of the circulating library and producing first-rate work. We shall, therefore, judge 'Patricia Kemball' by a higher standard than we should apply to the fictions of Miss Braddon, or Ouidà, or Mr. Charles Reade. Had 'Patricia Kemball' borne the name of any one of these authors on its title-page, we should have dismissed it with unqualified praise; but, as it is the work of a writer who may possibly yet take permanent rank among novelists, we must criticize it a little more carefully.

And first of the defects. Mrs. Linton's weakness is her tendency to draw from the lay figure. Sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Hamley, the self-made man, who "gloried in his Maker and asked the world to glorify him too," she begins with a conventional type, but by careful work she gradually produces a real living being. With too many others of her dramatis personæ she has not done so. The retired sea-captain of her early chapters, with "his ruddy weather-beaten face," and his "curly snow-white hair," and his model of the Holdfast, has he not figured in generation after generation of three-volume novels?—and as for Col. Lowe, who has run through his money on the turf, have not scores of young ladies put the dear, wicked monster with his "handsome contemptuous face," "blue blood," and "filbertshaped nails," into their ungrammatical romances and imagined themselves veritable Frankensteins all the time, and is not Miss

Braddon ready at any moment to serve up the haughty aristocrat for the delight of the readers of twenty country newspapers at once? But the greatest failure, in an artistic point of view, is the young sailor. Patricia Kemball is, in many ways, a capital character; but the man whose love is supposed to be the support of her life, and for whom she is content to wait for years, is a wellknown doll, "the bright young sailor," who is familiar to all Mr. Mudie's subscribers. Why, Mrs. Oliphant put him, only the other day, into her graceful Rose in June'; and here he is again, spoiling the artistic effect of the book, and its heroine. A minor defect is Mrs. Linton's tendency to pamphleteering. The chapter called "Added to the Estate" is simply a political tract, a clever piece of controversial writing, more effective, possibly, because freer from splutter, than anything Mr. Morley would have given us on the subject; but the reader cannot help seeing that it is out of place in a novel, and that, had Mrs. Linton devoted the pains she bestowed on sharpening her sentences to elaborating the characters of the Garths (shadowy people, and injudiciously named, because they suggest comparisons with Middlemarch'), she would have been a wiser artist.

The

But our fault-finding is now done. book has the first merit of a romance: it is interesting, and it improves as it goes on. We cannot dwell on the several situations in the volumes which have particularly pleased us; but we may single out one of the closing passages. Mr. Hamley, who liked "women who were timid and who screamed easily," "women he could buy with gifts and subdue through their senses, as he could make cats purr by pleasant treatment," and who "used to say that truth was indelicate in women- -not that he ever called them anything but ladies and that nature meant them to fib as she meant canaries to sing," has for years been the slave of an elderly wife of higher birth than himself, who had ruled him because "she had had a better education than he, and made no difficulties on the score of conjugal delicacy in showing him where he tripped and how he had exposed his ignorance"; but he gradually falls in love with the pretty though treacherous Dora, a relative whom he has adopted, and who, without any sufficient cause, so far as we can see, has contracted a secret marriage with Col. Lowe's son. The gradual rise of Hamley's passion, and the gradual decay of his respect for his wife when she has fulfilled the object for which he married her, that of introducing him into the society of Milltown, are portrayed in a masterly way; and, after the deathbed scene in 'A Rose in June,' we know of nothing in the novels we have lately read equal to the scene in which Mr. Hamley proposes to Dora, a few days subsequently to his wife's funeral:

"Dora was sitting in her accustomed place alone, dressed for dinner as usual; pretty, soft, amiable also as usual; but devoured by secret fear and anxiety, knowing exactly what

come

was to

but not knowing how it would end. When Mr. Hamley entered, and she met him with her pretty smile subdued to the proper melancholy tone of the moment, making a graceful, half-receptive movement of her head and hand as if welcoming him to her apartment-she saw her fate. She saw it in the man's white, moved face; in the subtle change from master to wooer, from

"He passed his large hand over her face. It was such a delicious luxury to him to feel that he had so far the right. He had, as he truly boasted, always treated her with self-restraint and respect, and the slackening of the curb was a joy so great he scarcely regretted the price of so many years' control he had paid for it. But we will keep it secret between ourselves, my dear,' he said. 'I offensive to that sainted soul's memory. She was should not like to do anything that would be a good wife to me, if a trifle crabbed and stiff, and I would not like people to say that I danced on her grave, or took my second wife before my first was cold. We will keep all this to our two selves; and when the year is out we will be married quietly, you know, and without much of a spread. she said. 'No one must know!' She said this Don't you think I am right, Dora ?'-'Certainly,' quite warmly. It was a reprieve to her so far, and who knows what that reprieve might not bring forth? Mr. Hamley might die-he did not look very like it though; or Sydney might die; or Julia Manley; or a thousand things might happen which would set her feet free from their present fetters. Wherefore she assented with alacrity, and so gave Mr. Hamley cause to congratulate himself again on the possession of a prospective wife so full of nice feeling and so entirely the lady as dear Dora."

Of the clever sayings in the book, we may quote a few. The fiercest are inspired by Mrs. Linton's antitheological bias. The rector of Milltown "preached his weekly orthodox sermon on what may be called dogmas of a second intention, not wholly moral nor yet wholly theological"; and Mrs. Linton speaks bitterly of "the ordinary ecclesiastical licence which, as a rule, goes even beyond the poetic." Of bitterness there is indeed a good deal in the book. "These women-soft, fair and false

"This

have ever been the women men love best. They have their uses, and one is that they sometimes avenge their honester sisters." two-faced quality which the world calls tact." In a lighter strain our author represents Mrs. Hamley as reading an "article on the latest book of scandalous chronicles, where all the highlyspiced bits were extracted, fenced about by an editorial padding of reprehension, by which means was accomplished that feat, so dear to English respectability, of enjoying impropriety under the pretext of condemnation." Before we conclude our notice of perhaps the ablest novel published in London this year, we mustr, however, propound a query to its author. If Col. Lowe married after he came back from "the Crimean trenches," what age should Sydney Lowe have preached when the story opened? We leave Mrs. Linton' to solve this problem; but we advise our readers to send to the library for her novel.

Mr. Black's little volume of graceful tales is partly a reprint of some that have appeared in the newspapers; but the principal one, of which the scene is laid in those western isles beloved of his incomparable Princess Sheela, will remind the reader of his most successful novel. It is a Highland love-story, dealing, in the fashion he has made familiar to us, with the simple people and manners of the Hebrides. Ailasa Macdonald is a fit heroine for such an idyll. She has much of the grace and