No Saint. By Adeline Sergeant. 2 vols. (Bentley.)—This is not
merely by far the best novel Miss Sergeant has produced, but merits a markedly high place among the novels of the season. The style is unstrained, and the story is told with equal ease and vigour, interesting the reader from first to last without the aid of sensational incident or literary artifice. Man's direct struggle is often with himself, rather than with external circumstance, and when Patti Hernshaw, having served his sentence in gaol, after killing his brother by an angry blow given under terrible provocation, returned to his native Lincolnshire village, he found it easier to bear the taunts and sneers of his former friends than the reproaches of his own conscience. But it was not until, under the chance sway of a child, he joined a revivalist service, that he understood how well-founded those reproaches, to which he had long hardened his heart, were, and knew what path of repent- ance and atonement to follow. "No saint," in truth, had he been up to that moment ; but from it, for a period at least, he was as much a saint as a man may be on this earth. And if finally, at the parting of the ways, he chose the easier one, this only proves that even saints are human. At all events, Paul Hernshaw earned his rest. The power and pathos with which his blind and passionate strivings to emerge from the darkness of his own soul are recorded,
lift the book high above the level of the ordinary novel. The description, indeed, of the revivalist service at which Paul found freedom is worthy of the pen of George Eliot. The other characters in the story are cleverly drawn, and Lincolnshire ways and scenes are faithfally and vividly portrayed. Of the society of the small country town which was the scene of Paul Hernshaw's bitter but not unrewarded expiation of his crime, Miss Sergeant gives many picturesque glimpses. The Church and Nonconformist elements that make up the respectability of such a society are, in especial, contrasted with no little skill and insight, and with not less fairness and good taste ; while some of the Dissenting portraits are admirable studies from life. The book may be cordially recommended, even to fastidious readers of fiction.
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