held last summer, to make known to the Government and to the Queen the hard case of the poor Indian.

"Alone and unfriended, this heroic woman left her husband and five children, her forest home still bound up in ice and snow, resigning herself to encounter unknown difficulties and perils, to prevent, if possible, the extinction of the few scattered remnants of a noble race of people. Her faith in God and her righteous cause have raised her up friends from place to place, and at length enabled her to reach the presence of The Great Mother,' and to spread before their Sovereign the-loyal and touching appeal of her chiefs and people, beseeching her, as their last resource, to interpose for their help, so that they may not be driven from their homes, their farms, and cultivated lands, by the cupidity of the white man.

"The Memorial which she presented to the Duke of Newcastle clearly illustrates her case; and shows that, according to existing laws and usages the lands of the Indians are held by tribal, and not by individual tenure; so that if the chiefs and a few of the people can be gained over, by whatever means, the whole of the lands reserved as a home for their tribe may be taken from under the feet, even of those who do not consent. This, in many instances, has actually aken place; and as the Indians are, in law, held to be 'minors' (the law for their enfranchisement being practically inoperative), they have no power of action. Thus, when, to save themselves, they purchased their own lots, at the sale of Indian lands, their money was refused, and it was stated that those lots could not be sold to Indians.'

A private letter states that friends in England who took a vivid interest in Nah-nee-bahwe-qua, had had interviews first with the Duke of Newcastle, and through him with the Queen; both satisfactory, although we do not yet know what will be the result; and since then they have also seen General Bruce, who as well as the Duke of Newcastle is going to Canada with the Prince of Wales. We can but hope all this will be availing, but it is difficult to meet the hand of power. The Goverment in this country is well disposed, but it is to be feared that the Colonial Goverment is sufficiently independent to act in this case without control. However, we hope much from the interest the Queen has taken in the affair.

XX.-NOTICES OF BOOKS.

Lucile. By Owen Meredith. Chapman and Hall.

IF it be necessary in these railroad days to apologize for reviewing a book which is already six months old, or rather, let us say, to apologize for not having reviewed it before, a writer in this Journal might fitly allege that its province is not merely to review current literature as such;—and that a thoughtful poem which it must in

deed have taken many months to write, may well be allowed also many months in which to circulate, receiving its tribute of ordinary praise and criticism from the press, and its measure of discussion from the mouths of numerous readers, before those who study it with a special interest and curiosity like ours, ask what effect it is likely to produce:

Lucile is a romance in verse;- -a rapid passionate story, which ends far more seriously than it begins, a compromise between a French novel and Evangeline, or Aurora Leigh. The double element is most curious;-the world of wealth and fashion and sentiment touching on what people are now wont to call "the problems of the age"; though we suspect they have been very much the problems of every age; only we in England in this nineteenth century are apt to consider that we possess a monoply of the earnestness of the last two thousand years; Owen Meredith touches whimsically enough on this very topic in the following lines; yet he hardly does himself and his aims justice; for he becomes very serious and even philanthropic in the latter half of his poem.

And the erudite ladies who take, now and then,
Tea and toast, with æsthetics, precisely at ten,
Have avouch'd that my song is not earnest because
Model schools, lodging-houses for paupers, poor laws,
The progress of woman, the great working classes,
All the age is concern'd in, unnoticed it passes.
And Miss Tilburina, who sings, and not badly
My earlier verses, sighs "Commonplace sadly!"
Tell them, tell them, my song is as old as 'tis new,

And aver that 'tis earnest because it is true..

Strip from Fashion the garment she wears: what remains
But the old human heart, with its joys and its pains?

Owen Meredith, in the latter half of his poem is, with or without his own consent, "brought to book" upon the serious and prosy questions he disclaims. How, indeed, shall he redeem his hero, in these latter days, without giving him a tinge of the philanthropic dye? And one of the finest and most forcible passages in the work is that wherein is described the many-acred and long-descended country gentleman plodding out the sunshiny months on wearisome parliamentary committees; uncheered by interest, for he takes none in their doings; untempted by ambition, for he desires no peerage; unstimulated by ambition, for his common sense assures him he has no genius for politics. Yet contentedly leaving his country sports, his simple home pleasures, his dignity of the great man of his district, to merge himself in a crowd where he counts only as a vote, simply because it is his duty to represent his county.

66

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The plot of Lucile is laid in the highest realms of fashion. duke, and a lord, and a countess are the prominent dramatis personæ. The scene is laid firstly in the Pyrenees, at the small towns where idlers resort for the air and the water; secondly, at Ems; thirdly, before Sebastopol. The story is painful in its insight, in its intensity, and in the continuous tension of the deepest feelings from first to last;

fortunately for the actors it is spread over the space of some years. The reader is apt sometimes to gasp for air and sunlight and the common meed of common days. Such life, such love, such grief, would surely wear this mortal frame away, was what we thought in reading Lucile. We learn from a retrospective conversation that the young Comtesse de Nevers, half French and half East Indian by birth, had been betrothed when quite girl to Lord Alfred Vargrave, the younger son of an English noble house. But she is too fond and he too fickle, and they part thus :—

Oh, the tale is soon spoken.
She saw it. What next?
Of course she was vex'd.
She sulk'd. So did I.

She bored me. I show'd it.
She reproach'd. I retorted.
I was vex'd that she was so.
If I ask'd her to sing, she look'd ready to cry.

I was contrite, submissive. She soften'd. Í harden'd.
At noon I was banish'd. At eve I was pardon'd.
She said I had no heart. I said she had no reason.

I swore she talk'd nonsense. She sobb'd I talk'd treason.
In short, my dear fellow, 'twas time, as you see,
Things should come to a crisis, and finish. 'Twas she
By whom to that crisis the matter was brought.
She released me. I linger'd. I linger'd, she thought,
With too sullen an aspect. This gave me, of course,
The occasion to fly in a rage, mount my horse,
And declare myself uncomprehended. And so
We parted. The rest of the story you know.

No, indeed.

COUSIN JOHN.

LORD ALFRED.

Well, we parted. Of course we could not

Continue to meet, as before, in one spot.

You conceive it was awkward? Even Don Ferdinando

Can do, you remember, no more than he can do.

I think that I acted exceedingly well,

Considering the time when this rupture befel,

For Paris was charming just then. I deranged

All my plans for the winter. I ask'd to be changed

Wrote for Naples, then vacant-obtain'd it—and so

Join'd my new post at once; but scarce reach'd it—when lo!

My first news from Paris informs me Lucile

Is ill, and in danger. Conceive what I feel.

I fly back. I find her recover'd, but yet

Looking pale. I am seized with a contrite regret.

I ask to renew the engagement.

Reflects, but declines. We part, swearing to be
Friends ever, friends only. All that sort of thing!
We each keep our letters. a portrait... a ring.
With a pledge to return them whenever the one

Or the other shall call for them back.

Ten years later, Lord Alfred is on the verge of marriage with Matilda Darcy, when Lucile hearing of his engagement by chance, desires to restore to him these letters, and to receive from him a

similar packet. He rides over to the village where she is staying, and finds that what he once despised has become the most charming and delightful of unattainable treasures. The passionate undisciplined girl, who loved him too much to retain him, has become the self-possessed and fascinating woman, who loves him still. So much he discovers ere they part; and he offers to throw over Miss Darcy, and to fling himself once more at the feet of Lucile; but, to his amazement, she rejects him, and bids him fulfil his engagement. Yet, we are led to suppose, he would have persevered and won her, but for the machinations of the bad duke, a disappointed lover of Lucile's. Lord Alfred is separated from Lucile by a look. It is curious that this is the second novel of this year in which the plot hinges on a look. In Hawthorn's "Transformation," the murder on the Tarpeian Rock is represented as born in Miriam's eyes ere it is realized by her lover Donatello's hands. Let human feeling only be sufficiently acute to perceive, and it is no fiction that one glance may turn the current of a life.

We give a long extract describing Lucile at the moment when Lord Alfred renews the intercourse between them. She is supposed to be nearer thirty than twenty years of age. The bitter trial of her youth has left her what the poet thus paints in vigorous and beautiful verse :—

Lucile de Nevers (if her riddle I read)

Was a woman of genius: not genius, indeed,

In the abstract, nor yet in the abstract mere woman:
But THE WOMAN OF GENIUS, essentially human,
Yet for ever at war with her own human nature;
The genius, now fused in the woman, gave stature
And strength to her sex; now the woman, at war
With the genius, impeded its flight to the star.
As it is with all genius, the essence and soul
Of her nature was truth. When she sought to control,
Or to stifle, or palter in aught with that truth,
'Twas when life seem'd to grant it no issues.

Her youth

One occasion had known, when, if fused in another,
That tumult of soul, which she now sought to smother,
Finding scope within man's larger life, and controll'd
By man's clearer judgment perchance might have roll'd
Into channels enriching the troubled existence
Which it now only vex'd with an inward resistance.

But that chance fell too soon, when the crude sense of power
Which had been to her nature so fatal a dower,
Was too fierce and unfashion'd to fuse itself yet
In the life of another, and served but to fret
And to startle the man it yet haunted and thrall'd;
And that moment, once lost, had been never recall'd.
But it left her heart sore; and to shelter her heart
From approach, she then sought, in that delicate art
Of concealment, those thousand adroit strategies
Of feminine wit, which repel while they please,
A weapon, at once, and a shield, to conceal
And defend all that woman can earnestly feel.

Thus, striving her instincts to hide and

She felt frighten'd at times by her very success;
repress,
She pined for the hill-tops, the clouds, and the stars:
Golden wires may annoy us as much as steel bars

If they keep us behind prison-windows: impassion'd
Her heart rose and burst the light cage she had fashion'd
Out of glittering trifles around it, unfurl'd

Wings of desolate flight, and soar'd up from the world.
In this dual identity possibly lay

The secret and charm of her singular sway

Over men of the world. 'Twas the genius, all warm
With the woman, that gave to the woman a charm
Indescribably strange; there appear'd in her life
A puzzle, a mystery-something at strife

With such men, which yet thrall'd and enchain'd them in part,
And, perplexing the fancy, still haunted the heart.
That intensity, earnestness, depth, or veracity,
Which starward impell'd her with such pertinacity
As turns to the loadstar the needle, reflected
Itself upon others: she therefore affected,
Unconsciously, those amongst whom she was thrown,
As the magnet the metals it neighbors.

Unknown

To herself, all her instincts, without hesitation,
Embraced the idea of self-immolation.
Unlike man's stern intellect, which, while it stands
Aloof from the minds that it sways and commands
By a power wrench'd from labor, sublimely compels
All around and beneath the high sphere where it dwells
To its fix'd and imperial purpose; in her

The soft spirit of woman that seeks to confer

Its sweet self on the loved, had her life but been blended
With some man's whose heart had her own comprehended,
All its wealth at his feet would have lavishly thrown.

For him she had then been ambitious alone:

For him had aspired; in him had transfused

All the gladness and grace of her nature; and used
For him only the spells of its delicate power:

Like the ministering fairy that brings from her bower
To some mage all the treasures, whose use the fond elf,
More enrich'd by her love, disregards for herself.
But standing apart, as she ever had done,

And her genius, which needed a vent, finding none
In the broad fields of action thrown wide to man's power,
She unconsciously made it her bulwark and tower,
And built in it her refuge, whence lightly she hurl'd
Her contempt at the fashions and forms of the world.

And, indeed, her chief fault was this unconscious scorn
Of the world, to whose usages woman is born.

Not the WORLD, where that word implies all human nature,
The Creator's great gift to the needs of the creature :
That large heart, with its sorrow to solace, its care

To assuage, and its grand aspirations to share :

But the world, with encroachments that chafe and perplex,
With its men against man, and its sex against sex.

"Ah, what will the world say?" with her was a query
Never utter'd, or utter'd alone with a dreary
Rejection in thought of the answer before