DIANA, LADY LYLE.* DIANA, LADY LYLE, is not a widow,
as her style would lead the reader to suppose, but a wife, the wife of a baronet who addresses people in the second person singular ; says "aside," when he ob- serves her ladyship's countenance under tempestuous circumstances, " What an imperial frown 1" and writing a letter to her from his yacht, directs it to " Diana, Lady Lyle," a proceeding which re- minds one of that ingenuous question once asked by an Irishman, "What is the world worth to a man when his wife is a widow ? " These are, however, mere trifles in comparison with the remarkable departures from ordinary behaviour of Sir Leonard Lyle, who begins by requesting a young lady, at their first interview, to call him " Lenny ;" and so grows in wisdom during the years in which we follow his fortunes, that having captured two vaga- bonds who pursue his wife with threats of revealing an unpleasant family secret, his fertile brain can suggest no better device for getting rid of them than, first, shutting them up in a vault, and then, forsaking his wife and carrying the conspirators off to sea in his yacht, there to cruise about during the remainder of their mortal lives. Five minutes' rational conversation with Diana, Lady Lyle, would, of course, have cleared up the whole matter, for Sir Leonard would have entirely credited his wife's true statement as to the existence of the documents which prove her legitimacy—need we remark that those documents are in the breast-pocket of the captured villain and involuntary voyager ?—and for the other little matter, the " slave-taint " in her blood, the enlightened Baronet cared not at all. When his wife confronts her cousin, the female conspirator, a " black scum," rejoicing in the appellation of " the Contessa Tab," in a scene which would be sublime, were it less unspeakably ridiculous, he " pleads in a voice fast breaking into jangle, ' Lash out, Di, in thy indignant scorn !" But Sir Leonard Lyle is perhaps the most irrational young baronet in modern fiction ; indeed, if he had ever any temporary visitings of common-sense, or the least notion of conducting himself like an English gentleman, at all events in public, Mr. Hepworth Dixon's preposterous story must have collapsed at an early stage of its wild career. Let us picture to ourselves the popular candidate for a seat in Parliament, preparing for the election, by addressing his little boy of three or four years old as follows Frank, my boy, give ear to me, and when thou art a man repeat the same words to thy son. One of thy fathers was the Silver Knight, who fought in the train of Lion Heart and fell in the breach at Ascalon. His blood is in thy veins, yet there is nothing in thy blood so noble as that which comes from thy mother's side The blood of Randolph is the blood of kings." And let us then picture the happy father of the infant phenomenon who under- stands all about Lion Heart and Ascalon, and the rest of it, when Sir Leonard, having been duly elected, the following scene takes place at Castle Lyle, in presence of " the Holderness Hunt," the Duke of Doncaster, a brace of sheriffs, and other visitors :-
"Luncheon-bell rings a second time. 'A fair day and a goodly work, resumes his Grace. 'Now, Lady Lyle, before we go to lunch, oblige these gentlemen by giving them a tip, a straight tip, like a Yorkshire woman, Lady Lyle.'—' A tip In earnest of success. Remember this is poetry, not politics. You are our Mayday Queen.'—' Silence for her ladyship !' call Lamber and the sheriff in one voice. ' Well, then,' crows Diana, laughing merrily, as your Mayday Queen,—la Reins le veult I Your Grace can play the chamberlain ?'—' Madame, it has been my duty and delight to serve the Queen.'—' My Lord Duke,' cries Diana, with a stately and bewitching coquetry, ' he awaits your Majesty's eommands.'—' Then bid our loving and deserving subject kneel I Sir Leonard Lyle, hand me the sword.' Sir Leonard, entering on the humour of the moment, kneels. The bell rings a third time. Diana, listening, laughs. 'Hem ! luncheon waits. Rise, Knight of the Shire!' A blare of trumpets greets the comedy. Leonard is about to rise, still laughing, but on looking at Diana, his face lights with a quick fire, and dropping to his knee again, he kisses her hand, and whispers, in a low and serious tone, ' My true heart's queen!' " Unlike Sir Leonard, we do not enter upon " the humour" of this scene, but fre provoked by its childish folly. Only a writer who lacks humour so conspicuously as Mr. Hepworth Dixon could put forth such heavy fooling as the scene just quoted, and many others with which the book abounds, by way of fun. Only Mr. Hepworth Dixon, too, would take such liberties with honest English verbs ; this is a trick of his style which grows upon him, and which was intolerably conspicuous in his White Conquest. In the first chapter of the first volume, we are introduced to an * Diana, Lady Lyle. By W. Hepworth Dixon. London : Hurst and Duckett. • American senator of astounding genius and wisdom, with " a Jove-like front," who dies under melodramatic circumstances, leaving his affairs and his family in a condition which, to ordi- nary mortals, would seem to be the result of consummate stu- pidity and extraordinary folly ; and this remarkable person, the heroine's father, who calls her " Di-Di " and " cam carissima," and is'" excited by the sheen and movement of his child," is en- dowed with a strange variety of modes of expressing himself. " 'Ha!' hems the senator, ' our guest is right ; ' " " Di-Di,' frowns the curly beard ;" " Excuse me,' nods the senator ;" " Cleared !' gasps the senator," and after that he " snaps " and " hisses," and does other strange things which in ordi- nary language are rendered by such simple verbs as "to say" and "to reply," while Di-Di of the " sheen " not only " cries," and " shouts," and " pouts," but " crows " and " screams " all kinds of utterances, mostly silly and affected ones. As to what the "lying slut" and the "squat over- seer," who are the early-indicated villains of the story, do in the way of wrenched and wrested verbs, it would be too tedious to take note of. In all these instances the author's aim is mere unlikeness to the modes of speech of other people, and if gram- mar be sacrificed to that end, so much the worse for grammar. Miss Diana Randolph is a young lady of the tom-boy order, with " a girl-like face, a pair of seeking eyes, and coils of hair the colour of Elizabethan gold "—whatever that may mean—and to her the soul of Leonard " goes out as in a dream," so that he muses about her after this fashion :—" Bright home,—yet brighter girl ! What eyes she has,—how blue ! They are the old Lyle blue ! [The latter coincidence is at least remarkable, seeing that Miss Randolph is not a Lyle.] I like bright things, though they are not my own. Fine yachts, swift horses, and golden curls. One doesn't care to think that one may never see such eyes again." Leonard sees them again when Miss Diana Randolph comes to England, having gone through the old, old story of the "slave-taint," and the stolen marriage certificate, and the wicked uncle, who comes into the property, and instructs his " myrmi- dons" to " trade-off " the live-stock, including his niece ; and the daring abolitionist who aids her flight, —in short, a complete hash-up of Mrs. Trollope's Jonathan Jefferson Malmo, Bulwer's Night and Morning, with a faint flavouring of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Octoroon. Of course, Diana and the fair Grace Gosnold, from Georgia, who takes her to England, are rapturously received by an eager section of the English aristocracy, and a brilliant era of dukes, dinners, and gilded saloons begins. And oh! how funny Mr. Hepworth Dixon is about his pet duke, his Grace of Doncaster, and how strictly natural is that great nobleman's interview with his nephew, just returned from everywhere. All the people in the book, indeed, are always scampering all over the face of the earth, and in more senses than one the reader never knows where he is, or where they are ; but it does not greatly matter,—they are as little like human beings playing their parts in real affairs in any one part of the world, as in any half- dozen parts of it. Mr. Fane, returning from America to Don- caster House in Piccadilly, his uncle's residence, with which he has been acquainted all his life, is ushered into a " snug " room, adorned with cabinet pictures by the great Italian masters, and a long ebony case containing rare editions of costly books. There he muses, as, of course, one would muse under the circumstances. " Quite a scholar's paradise !" he says to himself, when the Duke enters and accosts him :— " ' Reginald ! you take me by surprise ; I fear no carriage went to meet you at the station. What will Mrs. Fane think of me ? Tell her not to imagine anything so fearful as my lacking respect for my nephew's wife.'—' Not at all, your Grace. We landed late, came on by the evening train, and snatched a little sleep at Morley's.'—' Come into my cabinet, and share my cup of tea.' . . . . . ' Tell me about yourself and Mrs. Fane. Glad to come home again?'—' As a Switzer to his Alps, as an Egyptian to his Nile.'—' And her niece, Miss Gosnold, is she here too? '—She's here, and I suspect she'll stay.'—' Caught a young por- poise on her voyage ? My gracious mistress used to say that every young woman is an angler in troubled waters.'—'Partly at St. Catherine's, partly on the voyage. Her take's young Lambe; our Yorkshire neighbour. Recollect old Lamber, who married a sister of Sir Warren ?'—' Husband of my Amanda! Under the eyes of our royal mistress, we young fellows were confined to such poetic and platonic loves.'" And so on through several pages of similar lumbering levity. Miss Randolph dines at the Duke's, and then everybody tarns up from everywhere, and Mr. Hepworth Dixon annihilates time and space to make two lovers happy for a brief period, and a married couple exceedingly uncomfortable afterwards, which is a righteous punishment for their folly, their uncandidness, and their intense affectation. The whole thing, the " lotos-eating," and the seig- norial dignity, and the love-making, is all play-acting; one never
associates an atom of reality with Sir Leonard, and Diana, Lady Lyle, from first to last.
There is plenty of life and movement in the story, but they are not real in the portions which concern the leading personages, they are to be found among the subordinates ; and the " plantation " scenes are vivid. It is a pity that Mr. Dixon has in this instance also been unable to resist the temptation to coarse details which so easily and constantly besets him. But for the objectionable description of social relations on Senator Randolph's plantation, the book, which is very bright and readable in parts, might, though a signal failure as a work of fiction, have been pronounced thoroughly harmless. Young ladies are not very likely to emulate Diana, or to fall in love with Leonard ; but Tab and Slokh are not nice acquaintances, even in fiction, while the family history of the senator and his brother is hardly edifying reading for anybody.
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