WILLIAM LANGSHAWE THE COTTON LORD.

THIS novel has a variety of faults, and some which a stroke of the pen might remove. There is an introduction about the County Palatine, which if not out of place is unnecessary : there are frequent obtrusions of the author, her subject, and her book, which are useless, for in a good work they are not wanted, and a bad one 'they will not help, whilst they are written in the bad taste of magazine-wordrnongery : sometimes, too, the novelist deems it necessary to vouch for the truth of persons, either in a foot-note or by the addition of the actual history as well as the fictitious ; and she introduces rather long accounts of Manchester doings, which as here described are dull enough, and have not always much relation to the story. But she has one great advantage—she is familiar with her subject. Her tale may be somewhat disjointed, and its staple material derived from other books; her descriptions of life among the Cotton Lords may be literal; and there may be some inconsistency in her characters, since their sentiments and discourse, in the more level and social parts, are of a different kind from that which the exigencies of romance require, so that some of the persons are as it were double—on some occasions they speak, on others the author : still, in despite of these faults, there is the social life of manufac- turing Lancashire in William Langshawe the Cotton Lord. Hence the novel has interest, though perhaps not a very lively or poetical one, in the novelty of its subject ; for although the life may have been described before, it is more strikingly presented in fiction from being embodied in scenes and persons. At the same time, we think the life of Lancashire is displayed with more truth in its general mass than in its individuality. The body is indicated with more accuracy than its particular members ; we are better able to form a judgment of its grosser parts than of the intelligent or moral spirit that might be found there. The pecu- liarity of its outward forms is well impressed,—the parvenue splen- dour of its" cotton palaces," and their petite apology for a domain, contrasted with adjacent rows of miserable hovels, and surrounded by factories with tall chimnies, " belching the rolling smoke" if not the "fire" of MILTON'S hell; the luxurious dinners, and, very often, the vulgarity of the guests ; the fine dresses of the ladies, and the non-refinement of their manners. A singular social pecu- liarity is also brought out. From the cotton-trade being as it were a creation out of nothing save the inventions of WATT, ARKWEIGHT, and others, the majority of its chiefs have "sprung from nothing" ; and as its progress has been so rapid, their rise is yet too recent to allow of their origin being forgotten. Hence the millionaire is rolling in wealth whilst his near kinsmen are on the verge of actual poverty. Another peculiarity is the well-de- fined classes among the manufacturers, at least the older manufac- turers: first, the low and vulgar-minded man of coarse habits and unscrupulous morals, though possibly not devoid of feeling, who re- tains the manners and even the habits of his youth except upon com- pany-days ; second, the man with a larger mind, whose manners have been improved though not changed nor his original views altered, but who still appreciates the advantages of education in others although reckoning a knowledge of cotton the climax of human attaintnents ; and thirdly, the superior man, who has laboured, and not unsuc- cessfully, for the cultivation of his mind and manners. The classes

are all above false pride ; they are not ashamed of their origin ; they are proud of their trade. They are each distinguished by indefa-

tigable industry, great penetration and business knowledge, and

not overburdened with ethical refinements. Their virtues are not so distinctly brought out—they are told, not presented; but hos- pitality seems the most prominent. The rising generation, like the

virtues, are described, with the exception of James Balshawe,-- not the villain of the piece, for he rises no higher than a low and selfish rascality ; and we should be loth to imagine that the "fac- tory system" produced, as Mrs. STONE intimates it does, many such as he.

Abstracted from its various concomitants, the story is simply the old one of a wealthy trader, overtaken by sudden misfortune!,

sacrificing his daughter to uphold his credit. Edith Langshawe is the heroine ; Mr. James l3alshawe the bargain-lover, fur whom the veritable hero-lover is dismissed. The means of breaking off the odious match are a scene at the altar, where a victim of Mr. James is brought forward in the person of one of his own factory-girls and a cousin of Edith. Some further ob- stacles are interposed by the marriage of the hero in Italy ; and variety is produced by public incidents connected with the cotton-trade,—a strike, for instance, and the system of the Union. But, sooth to say, cotton is not a subject for fiction. The interest about the manners and characters is psychological, not dramatic ; the topics, based upon money, are inherently sordid; and though the feelings of parental anxiety are min- gled with those of profit and loss, yet both father and mother exhibit the "double" character we have already spoken of, when the authoress is endeavouring to excite the reader's sympathy through the sale of their daughter to a vulgar-minded " cotton- man." Mrs. STONE seems to have felt this, for her best characters and more romantic scenes are hardly connected with the cotton- trade. The exception is the story of Mr. James Balshawe's vic- tim; which is skilfully conceived and effectively executed. The seduction itself is passed over : the character of Nancy Halli- well is sufficient to inspire interest, yet her youth and situation are such as to extenuate her fall : her old lover is artfully drawn with an intellect so simple as not to cause -surprise that Nancy rejected him, yet with so much of honest spirit and true feeling as to ex- cite pity. The results both to the lovers and to Nancy's family are saddening, hut natural; nor is any part of this humble tragedy overdone. The double character of young Balshawe is also well conceived in both its phases ; but the two are incon- sistent. The licentious and selfish factor-master might conceal his vices in society, but the low blackguard could not so well cover his habitual language and manners; nor is it likely that his true cha- racter was not known to Mr. Langshawe to a greater extent than the necessities of Mrs. STONE'S novel compel her to allow. As a novelist, Mrs. STONE is, like many of her characters, double. In her descriptions of Manchester and its persons, she is often literal and commonplace in composition, and not well knit together in structure ; like many others, she has yet to learn that the case is rare where workmanship alone will redeem the ma- terial. In the story of Nancy Halliwell, and in the foreign scenes, where she has subjects adapted to fiction, there are power, spirit, and interest, which are mostly deadened among the cotton. It is from these parts, however, that we shall select our extracts, as more germane to the professed subject of the book.

A COTTON-MAN'S DRAWINGROOM AND DINNER.

The drawingrooin in which Mrs. Langshawe received her visiters was as splendid as money could make it. The furniture and decorations were, how- ever, all good—the best of their kind; but there was an elaboration in the style, and a profuseness in the ornaments, that savoured more of a heavy purse than a cultivated taste. The walls were hung with silk damask, finished off by massive gold cornices and mouldings, or draped round the magnificent mirrors, extending almost from the ceiling to the ground, which reflected the forms of a fair bevy of ladies, whose garments were not certainly their least noticeable ap- pendage. The couches, the ottomans, the bowies, the buhl timepiece, the pro- fusion of ornamental trifles that glittered around, the choice exotics in the recesses, the elegant china ornaments, and the magnificent cut-glass chandelier which sparkled like diamonds in ten thousand different hues, and gleaming in the mirrors gave the idea of a fairy-land vista opening on every side,—these, each in itself fit for the mansion of a nobleman, were yet clustered and crowded incongruously. They were, however, not merely collected, but, comparatively speaking, naturalized in the house of this low-born and uneducated cotton-

manufacturer.

The diningroom was equally expensive and luxurious, though somewhat more sombre in its adornments. But the dinner—ye god,! The table was profusely decorated with plate, magnificent and modern, and literally groaned under the weight of all those eatables that "man's german- dize can feed." The richest of soups and the most luxurious of fish were fol- lowed by a course of more substantial food ; which in its turn gave way to a succession of such elaborate collections of eatables as most surely were never congregated on any but a "cotton-man's table." And then, the manner of dis- cussing it ! Most earnestly did the good company do homage to the treat. There was no elegant trifling with plates and forks, no sentimental withdrawal from the vulgar and everyday habit of eating: the dinner was actually and elaborately devoured. Little was spoken during its progress, except on the merits of the various dishes and the intricacies of the culinary preparations. The good hostess entered with great animation into the mysteries of her cuisine, and exchanged sundry remarks with a well-dressed and rather saturnine-visaged gentleman on her left hand, on the propriety of this sauce having a grain more cayenne, or that ragout a thought less seasoning. Never had dinner more justice done to it. The company evidently met to eat ; and eat they did.

AN OLD "COTTON LORD."

"I'm reeght glad to see thee, Mr. Langshawe, that lam : you'll e'en tak me as ye find me : we've known each other these forty year, and the world's gone well wi' us both—thanks to luck and our own wit."

So saying, Mr. Balshawe ushered his unexpected visiter through the pas- !ages of a large and elegant house, and finally enthroned him in an armed chair in the kitchen—his own accustomed domicile when guests were absent.

"Now stir youreel', filaggy, come ; don't let the grass grow under your feet! If l'd done so, you'd neer hae had this fine house about ye. Come, mis- tress, stir yourself, will you; look sharp—be slippery ! " And Mrs. Balshawe did stir herself. With the quiet celerity of one well accustomed to the work, she laid a cloth with other etceteras on the table, and turning up the sleeves of her gown, did rather more than superintend the pro- gress of a steak which a servant was cooking. This operation achieved, she removed it to the table, placed chairs for her husband and his guest, and, as her wont was on ordinary occasions, prepared herself to wait upon them. This she did with great quietude and good humour : she looked meek and gentle, and it was quite evident that the leading principle to which she had been for a life- time habituated was that man was the nobler animal of the two; and if that was the case five-and-twenty years before, when her husband stepped from his little clay-paved loom-shop into the small apartment which was "parlour and bed-room and all," how much more must it be the case now, when he 'was monarch of all he surveyed" in his elegant and capacious mansion, or in the magnificent factory and thickly-populated hamlet which nearly adjoined it ? So she continued her attendance without remark ; the husband expecting it as a matter of course, and his friend not seeming to think the circumstance re- markable enough to elicit any notice, though varying from his own domestic economy.

A YOUNG "COTTON LORD."

With all Mr. Balshawe's overwhelming vulgarity, Mr. Langshawe knew that parental pride had caused him to have his son well educated, or at least sent to expensive schools ; and he was more pleased than otherwise to find that the young man had not imbibed any very inordinate taste for literature. Such taste Mr. Langshawe thought quite incompatible with business habits; such habits as he flattered himself were Mr. John I3alshawe's, when he found that if not occupied in travelling for the firm abroad, he was regular in his attendance at the manufactory at home. He did not know that he was a low-lived liber- tine, carrying, in the indulgence of his brutal pleasures, shame and sorrow to the lowly hearths of those whom his father was bound by every tie of decency and morality to protect and cherish. Too often is this the case with the half. fledged SOU of these secluded petty princes, who carry on a wasting warfare upon the morality and domestic comfort of their petty localities. Mr. Lang- shawe was well acquainted with this general fact, and deplored it ; for he was a man of kind heart and of rigid morality, a pattern of liberality and kind- ness and propriety in his domestic establishment, and of justice in his mercan- tile one. His operatives respected him, his domestics loved him. But even more than he lamented these and other debasing circumstances for their im- morality, did he deplore them because of the disparaging shade they cast over the 'cotton system "—that system which he thought the most magnificent triumph of humanity ; and he knew that this, at any rate, was one of the de predating evils which the Legislature, with its now vast infusion of mercantile wealth into it, dare not grapple with and pat down.

COMMERCIAL STRUGGLES.

In truth, it is wonderful to behold—and not the less wonderful because little known, and therefore a thing little esteemed—how fiercely and successfully men of high commercial fame battle with difficulties as they beset them. The politician, the soldier, the sailor, each has his loud acclaim for coolness and free- dom of demeanour in time of danger; but few remark, and nobody condescends to tell, how the mind of a tradesman battles with and subdues mere fleshly fears when that which he holds dearest on earth, his credit and his name, are in jeo- pardy, and the terrors of "stoppage" compass him about. In truth, that is no mean intellect which, on a crowded exchange, in the face of rivals, of those great ones whom he has met as equals, and those men to ahem a glance of re- cognition has been an acceptable favour, can cover with a face of cheerfulness a bosom of sorrows, and carry high the head when the last planks of the ship are about to part.

A BLIGHTED HOME.

"Well, Joe, what tidings ? what news ? Where is she ? What does he say ? "

" Nothing ; be tells me nothing. May —"

We cannot write down the curse which was wrung from the agony of the broken-hearted father on the destroyer of his child.

"What did you say to him ?"

" Say ! every thing that a humbled wretch like me could say. I begged, I im- plored—nay, I went down on my knees, wife—down on my knees on the bare ground to him, and implored him to tell me where she was. I felt at that minute as if I could forgive him all—every thing, if so be I could get my child again. He swears he knows nothing of her. But what's an oath to him I" Halliwell flung himself into the loom-shop, and shut the door after him ; nobody durst follow him. His poor wife leaned against the chimney, weeping silently ; her baby cried unheeded in the cradle; the other little ones were rollicking about the dirty floor, and some bigger ones were making futile and ill-directed efforts to disentangle some hanks of yarn which lay in matted heaps on one of the wheels, and quarrelling meanwhile as to whose fault it was that it was so entangled. The big gar' l was looking heedlessly through the dim and undusted casement, and the big boys were out bird-nesting. The looms were all silent ; none of the wonted merry din of Labour was heard in the cottage; and the pet plants in the little garden were sickening and dying for want of the accustomed watering-pot. The cottage-hearth was unsightly with the accumulation of the refuse and ashes of the preceding days; the dust lay thick on the bright carved oaken press; and the children's soiled and cast- off garments lay littering and unsightly around. Misery and desolation had entered this once happy and well-ordered abode. Nancy had disappeared, and had now not been heard of for some time. At first the hope of her speedy return had buoyed up her parents ; and, trusting to this, and not wishing to spread the knowledge of their degradation, they had kept her absence secret. But, as time passed and no tidings came of her, their grief had its way. Their neighbours were called in, and one and all, with the sin- cerest sympathy, assisted in a search for the poor girl ; but it was unsuccessful. At last, some one suggested that her seducer might have concealed her ; and, in a mingled agony of hope and fear, Halliwell hastened to him. The result we know. Mr. John Balshawe denied all knowledge of the fugitive's proceed- ings; but nobody believed him.