THE LIFE OF MARY SMITH.* THIS curious and sententious little

work must be regarded as another addition to the collection of literature which has risen from the ashes of Carlyle, and been, generally speaking, brought to the surface by the researches of Fronde. We are not a little tired, we own, of the domestic revelations of the Chelsea Prophet and his sorely tried wife, who must be generally credited, at all events, with a tongue as good to give as to take withal, As far as they are concerned, this must be taken as but another crusade on the same old text, Mrs. Car- lyle's letters to the young protegee who is the heroine of the book before us, being on the same line and plan as of old. Miss Smith was a governess in fact, and a "literary aspirant" in wish,—the verses which form her second volume, we regret to says showing cause enough why the aspiring stage was likely to be the beginning and the end of it. Mrs. Carlyle's first letter is the good old snub on the good old ground. She has "seen, and seen through, all you are now longing after. There is as little nourishing for an aspiring soul in literary society as in any civilised society one could name I And for ' clear ideas' and broad knowledge,' they are not secreted in any corner of life, but lie in all life, for whoever has faculty to appreciate them." This ancient truth has been so con- sistently disseminated by the fixed stars of literature, and still •more so by he lesser lights that revolve in their imme- diate neighbourhood, that the world is of course bound to believe it, and equally, of course, never will. Never will the literary aspirant believe that there can be another world like the literary world, or any other menagerie where lions can be found to roar so passing well. The successful literary man is—almost--as great an object of public, curiosity and worship as the successful comedian ; and to what more could he look f' The successful cricketer begins to run them hard, but his full time is not quite yet. In her second letter, Mrs. Carlyle preaches with something of the same point and novelty on the nobleness and mean- ness of a duty lying not in its greatness or littleness, but in the spirit in which it is done when it lies most near to hand. She illustrates her text by her despair when she learned early in her married life that she was expected to "look. after" her husband's stockings and buttons, and to learn to cook, and even to bake at home, when the bread brought from Dumfries "soured on the stomach " of Carlyle. This, after being " brought up to great prospects, and sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar and a very fair mathenaa- * Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolinistross and Nonconformist. A rrsg- ment of a Life. With Lettors from Jane Welsh Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle. Carlisle: Hemrose and Sons. The Wordsworth Press. 1892. titian." The passage is very amusing. She sent for Cobbett's' Cottage Economy, and fell to work at a loaf of bread. But she sat half the night over her oven, and at last sobbed aloud with her head on the table. Was she not at Craigenputtock, sixteen miles from everywhere P " Then somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini, sitting up all night watching his Pericles in the oven, came into my head; and suddenly I asked myself, After all, in the sight of the upper powers, what is the mighty difference between a statue of Pericles, and a loaf of bread, so that each be the thing one's hand hath found to do?' The man's determined will, his energy, hie' patience, his resource, were the really admirable things, of which the statue of Pericles was the mere chance expression. If he had been a woman, living at Craigenputtock, with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same, qualities would have come out most fitly in a good loaf of bread I' In five years at that savage place, " where her two imme- diate predecessors had gone mad, and the third had taken to drink," this germ of an idea was Mrs. Car- lyle's consolation. The first impression suggested by, this last sentence is that she was a fourth wife, and her husband an exaggerated Bluebeard. But it appears only to refer to the preceding ladies of the estate, which, after all, was Mrs. Carlyle's and not her husband's ; so it seems a little hard to quarrel with him for it. Moreover, we do not think the lady need talk about her " dyspeptic husband " to a young stranger who consults her as a governess from Carlisle. But she had a bad time of it, no doubt, and the touch is very characteristic. Equally and delightfully so is Carlyle's verdict, upon Miss Smith's poems, which she had sent for opinion. "The young lady has something in her to write, but she should resolve on sticking to prose." " That from him," adds, Mrs. Carlyle, " was rather high praise, I assure you." One cannot but fancy the shape such high praise would take in the eyes of an ambitious poetess. It is, moreover, amusing as a. study of human weakness, and a proof that it is not the slightest use even for a Carlyle to give "literary aspirants" invited advice in an unexpected direction, to find Mrs. Carlyle writing again, some seven years later (1865) :— " I am always glad to hoar from you, and like to read your verses, though I often wish you had taken to writing practical prose,—rather, that is, for your own sake. There is so little appreciation for poetry in those hard times."

Poor young poet! the result was still the same. The Carlyle correspondence closes with a letter from the great man himself, under date 1873. After a brief prelude of com- pliment on Miss Smith's sincerity, he writes " The question has sometimes arisen with me whether, if you wrote down your ideas and feelings in simple and distinct prose, it might not still be bettor for your readers and yourself. This is a question I cannot pretend to decide ; but my guess, if your circum- stances hinted, and your inclinations prompted, would be closely as above, As to Progress, about which there has been such chanting and trumpeting for the last half-century, especially for the last, score of years, I confess I never could see much in it, or decidedly discern any progress except in smithwork and its adjuncts—a very sooty, shrioky, and to me contemptible kind of progress— yielding, as I often say, immensities of gold to those who least of all deserve it amongst us ; and who can do, when one reflects upon it, nothing but mischief by being then made kings among their fellows. For the rest, I quite agree with you. All, or almost all the' progress' in smithwork and gold ingots is due to the Puritan ages, a fact which, on contrasting their moralities with our BO miraculous smithing, is a very melancholy one."

" Smithwork " is good, but how idly for good or for evil the "protest against progress" read then, as even more it does now, twenty years later. Ruskin carried the protest bravely on, but we have no fin de sibcle prophet to do it yet again.

They have been crushed under the rushing of the car. Philosophers and Divines and Poets, all must give in at last; and it is better and braver to fling one's lot bravely in with it; as Tennyson did. The end is not discernible ; but the thing is there.

We have been not so far over-courteous to Miss Mary Smith herself, who died at Carlisle in 1889, in her sixty-seventh year. The self-revelations of her autobiography are curious reading in their way; and its interest to us, as to herself, rests on its rigid Nonconformist character. Her father, " previously a Churchman and a worldly man" (she writes precisely as if the two were synonyms), became converted, by a Mr. Hood's preaching at an Independent chapel, into a "truly devoted spiritual man and a Nonconformist "—Puritan in life and Calvinist in creed—and all things became new in the house. The father was a bootmaker in a Northamptonshire village, and his wife a farmer's daughter who had been the Vicar's cook. The neighbours laughed at the " meetingers," as they called them, but had no effect upon the steady lives of this devoted little band of Dissenters; and the " ladies from the vicarage" would have nothing to say to the little girl who

answered all her New Testament questions in school, when they found that her father didn't go to church. The ques- tions, she says, were very easy, but none of the other girls even tried to answer them. Alas for the odium iheologicum even in so young a mind as Mary's ! She was a true little Nonconformist heroine throughout, however, and her other great subject is her passion for reading, imbibed very early indeed. " Popery ! popery ! " wrote her father on the Church catechism ; " please don't let the child learn this !"

We fear that under all this influence our Mary, though more than commendably earnest, grew up something rather like a little prig. At least, we scarcely know under what other head to arrange her quaint utterances on marriage :- " Had I been a Duke's daughter, I could not have been more careful of keeping clear of any matrimonial liaison than I was. I did not want matrimony ; it was congenial labour I wanted. For this I prayed and waited and suffered. I often thought that my plainness and poverty were my best safeguard. Moreover, I was so grave and lofty ; lived upon a mountain, as Mr. Osborn told me, that none of the opposite sex presumed to speak lightly to me."

Poor little lady ! If this had been her style of prose, it is doubtful if the Carlyles' advice had much reason in it after all. To be poor and plain and lofty has not unfrequently been found effective in repelling the " opposite " sex; and the sim- plicity of supposing that the daughters of Dukes have any special objection to "matrimonial liaisons," has a touch of Puritan innocence quite original in its way. In another place, Miss Smith says that she had " higher visions than matrimony ;

literature, poetry, and religion gleamed fair before her being in the world, but not of it, nor aspiring after any of its flimsy gewgaws." The odd coupling of religion with poetry and literature as a kind of aesthetic pursuit, and the generali- sation of marriage as a flimsy gewgaw of the world, are characteristic of this Oarlylean authoress.

Otherwise worth noting throughout the book is the belief

in direct divine guidance in the smallest matters of life, which never deserted this singular enthusiast. She always recurs to it. If a friend consults her as to the advisability of getting a Catholic cook to change her creed, she answers after a moment's thought : " Do you think we can make Anne a better girl by doing so I) "—and then wonders how " so wise an answer can suddenly have been vouchsafed to her." It will strike most of us as a very natural one. " The force of creed, however, is very great," simply adds Miss Smith. And cer- tainly it has been found so. Her own Puritanism was open enough. Under " divine infatuation," she threw aside ear- rings and corals and flowers, delighting in her cross like St. Theresa, she says. " No youth or maiden of Scripture or sacred story was more surely led by God than was I," is another of her sayings ; and it is pretty and quaint to read, in contrast to it, her remark after her first railway journey, that no autocrat ever conferred on the world such benefits as

George Stephenson. So comes " the modern side " in every- where ; Mary Smith's contrast between the North and South, and her love for the battle-spirit of the former, where she elected to be buried in preference to her home, are nicely indi- cated throughout her school-teaching struggles.

We have not left ourselves much space to deal with her poetry. Like Pendennis, she began in the local journals, and her first essay, which she gives us, is perhaps a little more suggestive of the 0 barteris paper than of actual verbal inspira- tion. It is called " Look Up "

-"Heaven's holy missionaries, the stars, come every night,

And talk of God and destiny in the language of light; And walk we with downcast eyes P Are their wondrous words unread P Their voices all unheard P 0 Man, lift, lift thy bowed head."

When Mrs. Carlyle admonishes her young friend as to her versification being, " in a word, unmusical," she is scarcely too ungentle. "It doesn't scan " would have been a summary. But our poetess could be satirical as well, especially at election times ; and here is one of her squibs, which had a great

• effect

"So give the Dean a surplice clean, And W. N. his stick ;

He'll have to walk, and soon, I ween, Bo let him have it quick."

For she was a. real Radical, our little governess ; in'spite of her sympathies with Dukes' daughters about matrimonial

liaisons,—her spirit having first been strongly moved in that direction when a Tory candidate kissed her, a very little girl, on asking for her father's vote. After that, her comments upon the classes became very strong indeed. Through one Carlisle election, she did most of the writing in a paper called the Liberal OW, and adapted Scotch popular ballads under the signature of " Burns Redivivus." Altogether, it was a busy and mingled, and not uninteresting life, which the students of biography will find worth their reading. As a specimen of her better verse, we agree with her editor that the following upon February is worth recording, though scarcely perhaps worth a place, as he thinks, among the

lyrics of the Elizabethan dramatists. The first line is in• expressive :—

" With nature sweet he bears it high.

A braggart, threatening face he wears ; If ho must die, his corpse shall lie In warrior state, he loud declares.

He'll have no garlands round his head, No foolish trappings of young flowers ; But better fitting these instead, The missiles keen of his own hours.

Snow, hail, and rain shall mark where lies His corpse when dead, and madcap spring (The virgin with the changeful eyes) Shall hear his loud artillery ring."