MR. GILBERT S NEW TALES.* MR. GILBERT delights in the

artifice of taking common life and pro- saic human nature just as it is, and then introducing some one single variation, either by the assumption of a special monomania on the

part of one of his characters, as in Dr. Austin's Guests and Shirley Hall Asylum, or by the assumption of some preternatural condi- tion, as in his clever little Magic Mirror, and in these tales,—the

conditions of which he works out with all the gravity and business- like accuracy of a merchant's diary or a sailor's log-book. The effect of this business-like accuracy of detail is not unnaturally heightened either by the weird effects of monomania, or, though in less degree, by the gift of fanciful preternatural powers ; and yet we doubt whether Mr. Gilbert was not most effective of all when he had no recourse to this contrast, but kept to the domain not only of strict probability, but of probability without the heightened

colours of mental disease, in the Goldsworthy Family. The matter-

of-fact style is an admirable one for giving the full effect of these contrasts, if they are to be painted at all. But there can never be as much art in delineating the play of morbid disease, or the glare of an imaginary necromancy, as in painting the moral contrasts which are always startling us in actual life and in our own souls, and we doubt if Mr. Gilbert has ever reached so high a point of true art as in painting the deepening furrows of craft and avarice in Mr. Goldsworthy's calculating soul. These tales of an imaginary Italian wizard are powerful of their kind, and are not wanting either in Mr. Gilbert's grim humour or in occasional weirdness of effect. Still it is impossible not to hope that Mr. Gilbert will employ his great power of so carving out the minutia of every-day life as to engrave character by sheer weight of pressure on the detail of its most uniform and characteristic routine, less on his favourite eccentric sub-

jects, and more on modern life as we know it, than in these tales. De Pro fundis and The Goldsworthy Family will live longer, and deserve to live longer, than the Wizard of the Mountain. Still these strange tales are not only ingenious, but not without striking artistic effects of the Defoeish type in which Mr. Gilbert delights.

Mr. Gilbert's general idea, as we may call it, in these tales, seems to be to represent men applying to the use of magic gifts precisely the same principles of action which they would apply to the use of their own ordinary gifts,—overreaching, gambling, hoard- ing, hair-splitting, bullying,—just as they would if the powers they were using had been naturally their own, and not surrounded by any halo of the preternatural. This is not in itself a very original idea. The originality lies in the tone of trustworthy precision,—as of a chronicler who never had an idea in his head in

his life to disturb him, but whose only view is to record with stolid, painstaking diligence the facts which passed under his own eye,—

with which the succession of events is recorded. When a man has, or seems to have, obtained a new lease of life for another hundred years, when already grey with age and on the brink of a dishonour- able grave, and when with that gift he has a magic purse that will fill itself with gold pieces at a wish, the reader scarcely expects to have his actions chronicled in the tone of the soberest and most matter-of-fact of diaries, and the effect is necessarily to give a certain sort of verisimilitude,—such as Defoe gave to the apparition of Mrs. Veal,—even to the preternatural facts related. That the crafty and corrupt old lawyer whose lease of life is thus apparently

renewed, should try to overreach the magician and keep his gift

without fulfilling its conditions on the strength of a mathematical quibble as to the meaning of the terms, is not perhaps really as natural as it is supposed to be ; for one of the first results of experience in callous and crafty hearts is a genuine belief that the powerful will use their power unscrupulously, and not allow them- selves to be set at defiance by those who are dependents on their

bounty. Dr. Onofrio, if as crafty as he is intended to be, would have swindled every one but his preternatural benefactor, and would have been servile in obedience to his conditions, especially

as it would have cost him nothing but servility to be so. Still, there is ingenuity in the conception that Dr. Onofrio would have taken a delight in applying his acuteness in legal quibbles to screw more out of his contract than it appeared to contain, and so, in fact,

• The Wizard of the Mountain. By William Gilbert. 2 vols. London: Strahan.

overreaching himself. And when it appears that the magician had really only been testing his honesty of purpose by giving him a dream in which he had supposed himself made young and rich again under certain conditions voluntarily accepted,—and all the while watching how the dreamer's secret will was inclined towards the conditions thus imposed upon him by his benefactor,—whether it would try to rid itself of them or obey them, so soon as the immediate constraining presence of the wizard were removed,—the subtlety of the conception comes upon us with a very keen surprise, in strong contrast to the plodding fidelity of the style.

But perhaps the best of these tales are those in which Mr. Gilbert gives scope to his peculiar and grim humour, by showing how little competent even the most astute,—nay, the most worthy and respectable people,—are to wish themselves new sources of happiness or new resources against misery. The story of the Old Husband and Wife, Tomaso and Pepina, who wish to be young

and strong together again, after fifty years of happy married life, but who, when they are told that the magician can make either of

them so, but not both, at once resolutely refuse the gift, until the enchanter offers to divide it by giving the old man youth of mind and feeling in his aged body, and the old woman youth of form and beauty, without any renovation of inward feeling, is one of the happiest and subtlest in these volumes. The wretchedness which the new incompatibility produces,—the snubs which the aged mind in the youthful body administers to the youthful mind in the aged body,—the fierce jealousy with which the aged youth sees the admiration bestowed on the youthful aged one by his side,—the delight with which they both agree to recur to their old condition before the expiration of the time at which the power to do so would have ceased, are all delineated with a dry humour and realism of effect that is really a miracle of literary ingenuity.

To our minds, the best tale in the volumes is the one of the pair of misers,—the fat clerk and the thin priest,—

Don Bucefalo and Padre Falcone, who, in simultaneously mak- ing the attempt to outwit each other and to deceive the magi- cian, succeed only in exchanging ills with each other, the priest gaining the clerk's fat, the clerk gaining the priest's

leanness, and both winning, in place of the much coveted treasure, an imminent danger of being prosecuted and punished in common

for a grave State theft by the jealous Republic of Venice. This story is told with inimitable humour and gravity, from the first account of the two misers' combination against the poor washerwoman who annoys them by drawing up her bucket full

of water from the courtyard below into her fifth storey, to the denouement in which they are punished by playing a sort of

Tantalus-seesaw of moral bucket to each other, each painfully drawing up for the other the object of the other's desire, which turns out to be his punishment, and receiving it from him in turn. These two stories, that of Tomaso and Pepina, and of Don Bucefalo and the Curate, strike us as far the subtlest and best in these two volumes. The latter especially has, besides its grim humour, an artistic irony which at least equals anything which Mr. Gilbert has attained before. None of the stories will bear extract. We do not mean to play upon words when we say that their whole effect depends on their effect as wholes.

There are two stories in which Mr. Gilbert aims with some suc- cess at ghastliness of effect,—that of the last Lords of Gardonal and the Innominato's Confession. But though he is not unsuc- cessful in them, we doubt whether he is so successful as we should expect from his special power of inventing a matter-of-fact back- ground for his horrors. Certainly, these tales appear to us quite second in merit to the tales of irony, though they are more strik- ing than the two tales of happy and unhappy love which turn upon the story of two magic flowers.

On the whole, while we recognize in two of these stories some of the best and subtlest of Mr. Gilbert's efforts, and in many of them considerable power, we hope to see him turning back again soon into the delineation of those weird effects of which he is a perfect master, and which involve no unnatural or preternatural incident, —the delineation of the cares, and passions, and crimes, and vir- tues, and struggles, and victories or defeats, of plodding, vulgar, ordinary men.