t we have characters, and incidents, and traits
of manner introduced, which are mere shreds from the most heterogeneous
romances. We have a blind Irish harper, "relic of the picturesque bards
of yore," startling us at a Sunday-school festival of tea and cake in an
English village; we have a crazy gypsy, in a scarlet cloak, singing
snatches of romantic song, and revealing a secret on her death-bed which,
with the testimony of a dwarfish miserly merchant, who salutes strangers
with a curse and a devilish laugh, goes to prove that Ernest, the model
young clergyman, is Kate's brother; and we have an ultra-virtuous Irish
Barney, discovering that a document is forged, by comparing the date of
the paper with the date of the alleged signature, although the same
document has passed through a court of law and occasioned a fatal
decision. The "Hall" in which Sir Lionel lives is the venerable
country-seat of an old family, and this, we suppose, sets the imagination
of the authoress flying to donjons and battlements, where "lo! the warder
blows his horn;" for, as the inhabitants are in their bedrooms on a night
certainly within the recollection of Pleaceman X. and a breeze springs
up, which we are at first told was faint, and then that it made the old
cedars bow their branches to the greensward, she falls into this
mediaeval vein of description (the italics are ours): "The banner
_unfurled it_ at the sound, and shook its guardian wing above, while the
startled owl _flapped her_ in the ivy; the firmament looking down through
her 'argus eyes'--

'Ministers of heaven's mute melodies.'

And lo! two strokes tolled from out the warder tower, and 'Two o'clock'
re-echoed its interpreter below."

Such stories as this of "The Enigma" remind us of the pictures clever
children sometimes draw "out of their own head," where you will see a
modern villa on the right, two knights in helmets fighting in the
foreground, and a tiger grinning in a jungle on the left, the several
objects being brought together because the artist thinks each pretty, and
perhaps still more because he remembers seeing them in other pictures.

But we like the authoress much better on her mediaeval stilts than on her
oracular ones--when she talks of the _Ich_ and of "subjective" and
"objective," and lays down the exact line of Christian verity, between
"right-hand excesses and left-hand declensions." Persons who deviate
from this line are introduced with a patronizi