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    Surely nothing more animated or more picturesque than this has been sen home by any of the ready-writers in the Crimea . On the day before the battle of Inkermami , Mrs . Duberly writes , with the coolness of a fieldmarshal , " We are doing nothing particular , beyond firing red-hot shot . " After the battle , again , " We fought as all know Englishmen will fight . Mrs . Duberly is everywhere—a part of the army ; in fact , the army did not like to " -0 into action unless Mrs . Duberly looked on—Queen of Beautyto distinguish , as . far as the smoke would allow , friends and heroes on the field . Thus , before the first attack on the Redan : — General Marklmm rides up , and says , " Mrs . Duberly , we shall have a fight tomorrow . You must be up here on Cathcnrt ' a hill by twelve o clock . ' This is , in all respects , a remarkable volume . It is well-written , the narrative is rapid and connected , the successive battles are described with real pictorial effect .

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    RACHEL GRAY . Rachel Gray . A Tale founded on Tact . By Julia Kavanngh . London : Hurst and Blackett . Rachel Gray is not a story of a fine lady's sorrows wept into embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs , or of genius thrust into the background by toadeating stupidity . It does not harrow us with the sufferings and temptations of a destitute needlewoman , or abash us by the refined sentiments and heroic deeds of navvies and ratcatchers . It tells the trials of a dressmaker who could get work , and of a small grocer , very vulgar , ami not at all heroic , whose business was gradually swallowed up by tbe large shop over the way . Thus far cc Rachel Gray " is commendable : it occupies ground which is very far from being exhausted , and it undertakes to impress us with the every-day sorrows of our commonplace fellow-men , and so to widen our sympathies , as Browning beautifully says— Art was given for that : God uses us to help each other so . Lending our minds out . " Rachel Gray" further professes to show hov / Christianity exhibits itself as a refining and consoling influence in that most prosaic stratum of society , the small shopkeeping class ; and here is really a new sphere for a great artist who can paint from close observation , and who is neither a caricaturist nor a rose-colour sentimentalist . We wish we could say that Miss Kavanagh ' s judgment in choosing her subject lias been equalled by her success in working it up . We do not feel that the story of " Rachel Gray " brings any nearer to us the real life of tl \ e class it attempts to depict ; still less that " Rachel Gray ' s " piety gives the reader any true idea of piety as it exists in any possible "dressmaker . It is

    A mild ray " nt fell on her pale face and bending figure . She sewed on , serio-us and still , and the calm gravity of her aspect harmonised with the silence of the little parlour which nothing disturbed , save the ticking of an old clock behind the door , the occasional rustling of Mrs . Gray ' s newspaper , and the continuous and monotonous sound of stitching . Rachel Gray looked upwards of thirty , yet she was younger by some years . She waB a tall , thin , and awkward woman , sallow and faded before her time . She was not , and had never been handsome , yet there was a patient seriousness in the linea of her face , which , when it caught the eye , arrested it at once , and kept it long . Her brow , too , was broad and intellectual ; her eyes were very fine , though their look was dreamy and abstracted ; and her smile , when she did smile , which was not often , for she was slightly deaf and spoke little , was pleasant and very sweet .

    She sewed on , . as we have said , abstracted and seriou 3 , when gradually , for even in observation she was slow , the yellow crocuses attracted her attention . She looked at-them meditatively , and watched them closing , with the decline of day . And , at length , as if she had not understood until then what was going on before her , she smiled , and admiringly exclaimed : — " Now do look at the creatures , mother ! " Mrs . Gray glanced up from her newspaper , and snuffed rather disdainfully . " Lawk , Rachel ! " she said , " you don't mean to call crocuses creatures—do you ? I'll tell you what though , " she added with a doleful shake of the head , " I don't know what her Majesty thinks ; but / say the country can't stand it much longer . " . Mr ? . Gray had been cook in a Prime Minister's household , and this had natui'ally given her a political tura .

    " The Lord has taught yem , " murmured Hachel , bending over the fkwers with something like awe , and a glow spread over her sallow cheek , and there came a light to her large brown eyes . The mere novel reader , who cares only for excitement or amusement , will find little attraction in " Rachel Gray / " The story , as we have intimated , is of that quiet kind , which depends for its pathos and its humour on the delicate and masterly treatment of slight details , and in this sort of treatment it is altogether deficient . In our judgment , then , " Rachel Gray ¦ " is a failure ; and it is our disagreeable ^ luty to say so , for the sake not only of the public but of the authoress , from whose talents and diligence we hope for better things to come . ^

    an abstract piety , made up of humility , resignation , and devotion , feeding on Milton ' s sonnyts , and quite disembodied of sectarian idiom and all other fleshly weaknesses which are beneath Miss Kavanagh ' s own mind . Our own experience 6 i what piety is amongst the uneducated has not brought us in contact with a Christianity ¦ which" smacks neither of the Church nor of the meeting-house , with an Evangelicalism which has no brogue ; and if , when Miss Kavanagh says that her tale is founded on . fact , she means that the character of " Rachel Gray" is a portrait , we are obliged to say that she has failed in making us believe in its likeness to an original . We are far from meaning that there are not feelings as essentially beautiful as Rachel ¦

    Gray s to be met with amongst the uneducated , but the feelings run into a specific mould ; the } - do not exhibit themselves as abstract virtues , but as qualities belonging to an individual character , yf mixed moral nature and uncultured intellect . All this , perhaps , Miss Kavanagh knows as well as we ; but either from too great haste to publish , or from unwillingness to give the requisite labour to her work , she has produced a book which might have been written in an ignorance both of heart and of life which we cannot impute to her . - She even seems to be conscious herself of her failure towards the close of her volume , for she resorts to the very unartistic plan of telling her reader that lie would be touched by the s-. mtows she describes , if they were depicted by an abler hand .

    Oh , passion ! eloquent pages have been wasted on thy woe *; volume * have been written to tell mankind of thy delights ;\ vA xliy torments . To no other tale will youth bond it * greedy oar , of no other feelings will man acknowledge the power to charm his spirit and his heart . And here wan one who knew thoe not in name or in truth , and yet who drunk to the ilrcg * , and to the last bitterness hie cup of sorrow . Oh ! miserable and import iu griefd oi' the i > i'odtiio poor ' . Where nre ye , elements of power and patho * of our uu . dern epic—tho novel / A wretched shop that -will not tuke , a . sickly child iU . u dies ! Ay , ami weve the picture but drawn by an abler- hand , know , proud iv : akr , it' proud " thou art , that thy very heart could bleed , that thy very « oul wou ' ul be wrung to re ; ul thin page from a poor inun ' n utory . To scold a reader for not feeling is u way of trying to make him feel which is more feminine tUam felicitous . A more favourable specimen of Miss KavanaglFs stylo is the sc « xic in which Rachel Gray is introduced to the reader .

    A littlo nix-roomed honno it wan o . \« utl y facing tL < > droniy , haunted niunrrion ' and o ^ poHctl to ull tho noinos aforesaid . It wiih , u ! r . > . , to any tho truth , an ahoilo of poor and moan aspect . In the window hung u > lr .-.. tnmkov ' H board , on which was modestl y imsoribu'd , with a lint of prices , tho n . iino <> i ' - " llAClll'lC CJltAY . " It wan accompanied with pattern * v » f yellow \ w \ i . r , -h « evo . s trimmed in nvory colour , an old book of At .-hion . s , and lioiuttit ' ul and l . i \ , J , t , n * if retired in wood or meadow , a pot of yellow crocuaen in bloom . They . , \ ro cloning now , for we-inni wan drnwiiiK in , mid they know 1 ho hour .

    Ihoy Imd opono « l to light in tho < lin « y parlour nithiii , and which wo will now e « toi \ Itwart but a littlo room , and tho moR gloom . > : ' a spring twilig ht , hulf-nlled it . ' . llio furniture , though poor and olcl-f ' iinhionod , a , n * minipulounly eloa . ii ; and jt Hhono aigain in the iliukering Jhu- % ht . A few didculoiu-ud print * in liliidt inuuott huiiKiiKuhirtt-, Mid w « Hh ; two or tlu-oo broken vhina orniwiiontu adornod the wooden inantd-Hholf , whieh mw , xnuroovor , doeorutcl with u dmk-lookiii £ mirror m a nm of tarninhod gold . By tho fire an oMer'ly womun of grave mid nlom h ^ . kI , but who hud ouou boon nanctoomo , mt rending tho ucWNpapur . Noar tho window , two nuprentioen nowod under the nuperiutendonco of Riushol ( iruy .

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    THACKERAY'S MISCELLANIES . Miscellanies : Prose and Verse . By W . M . Thackeray . 'Vol . II . Bradbury and Evans The second volume of the " . Miscellanies" is not equal to the first , yet it contains some very agreeable pages . The whole of the " Yellow Flush Papers" are here , with their grotesque ^ hieroglyphs , their monstrous and impossible spelling ; also the " Jeames Papers " ; " " Sketches and Travels in London ;" " Novels by Eminent Hands ; " and" Character Sketches . " Even those who most admire the genius of Thackeray , and we are of the number , must regret that more severity has not been exercised in the selection of fugitive papers . Many of the present volume sewed their purpose in the pages of Froser and Punch , and should have been left there unexhuraed ; we particularly condemn the republication of that attack on Buhver and Lardner

    in the " Yellow Plush Correspondence ; " nor do we see any justification in the intrinsic merit of several other papers for their being reprinted in this permanent form . If , as we noticed in the review of the first volume , a critical and biographical interest attaches itself to the sketches and preludes of a great artist , that interest is almost entirely disregarded in this publication owing to the absence of the indispensable dates . Why the date and place of each was not given we cannot imagine . There could be no difficulty in the author ' s assigning the date . It would have occupied no space . But it would have given a value to productions which they have not intrinsically ,

    because it would have enabled the critic to trace the growth and development of a style , which all England acknowledges to be . among the most remarkable of all the styles our humorists and satirists have exhibited . The * great sameness of the themes upon which he plays is salient in ihese " Miscellanies ; " one would like to know whether the consummate pictures in " Vanity Fair " and " Pendennis" were results of which the " studies" are here given , or whether what we here take to be studies were feeble copies , painted when the hand was weary and the brain unwilling . But in these volumes , late and early , first thoughts , and thoughts feeble " from exhaustion , are assembled pell-mell without a word of indication .

    The finest things in this volume are unquestionably the " Novels by Eminent Hands : " a series of parodies representing Bulwer ' s novels , James ' s novels , Mrs . Gore ' s novels , Lever ' s novels , and Disraeli ' s fictions ( the others write novels , but Disraeli's are too peculiar not to deserve a special name ) . In the whole range of parody we know of nothing at all upproaching these . We marvel if Disradi could ever again write one of his Oriental absurdities , after his trick had been so mercilessly exposed , his fustian so ludicrously reproduced , his style surpassed with such ense even in those parts upon which he most piques himself . It seems to us that if he haul been labouring

    under the nuthor ' s delusion up to that time , he could not continue m it afterwards , lie may have believed his melodious assemblage of words was eloquence , and that his descriptions had a glowing truth stbout them , until Thackeray showed him how easy such eloquence is , how Holy well-street can ha pnintod with nn Oriental brush which shall make the Rose of Sharon grow in its gutters , and the splendours of Damascus glitter in its buck parlours . Thackeray ' s skeleton of the novel "Codling&by" is quite a study- Onl yj nferior to it is tlui parody of Bulwer with its wonderful mimicry of Bulwer ' s " eloquence , " capitals , noiiicaniug , slang , and pedantry .

    Excellent also , both in stylo rind spirit , is tho paper , ' Going to ace a Man Hanged , " which was a real transcript of experience , and excited { M-ent attention on its first publication in Frasvr : the d « t « is idh ' xcd to this paper , although why it is singled out we know not . What has been done in this case should have lie en ( lone in all . Historical Sketches of the Any tiny Literature of All Nations By Itobcrt Blakoy . J- Russell Smith , London . Fishers , who are also fishers of books , will thank Mr . Wakey for his industrious compilation of piscatorial nun , from the earliest biblical records of the taking of fish down to the dentil of the lust jack caiught . by Mr . Jones n . t Tottenham ! .

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    Jm «> ary 5 , 1856 . 1 THE LEADER . 19

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Jan. 5, 1856, page 19, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2122/page/19/