A Haunt of Ancient Peace : a Story. By Emma
Marshall. (Seeley and Co.)—The " Haunt " is Nicholas Ferrar's house at Little Gidding, and Dr. Donne and George Herbert take a part in the scenes described in the story. An extreme Churchman like Ferrar is contrasted with an imaginary John Davenport, a conscientious Puritan of the severest type, who by his austerity and want of tact drives from him for a time the lovely young wife to whom he is passionately devoted. Magdalene, wilful, courageous, with strong affections and an eager love of pleasure, finds the home to which John Davenport has taken her intolerable, for there his mother reigns, and she is wholly without sympathy, and shows that she has none, for the beautiful girl, who is not yet seventeen. To Magdalene Oldham Manor House becomes a prison, and with a certain Lady Betty she escapes to London, is presented to the Queen, and becomes a Court favourite. She has now all that she sighed for, but is very unhappy ; her beauty and position expose her to daily risks, and a single word of love from her husband, who comes to her in disguise at a masked ball, would have instantly won her back to him. That word, however, he failed to utter, and eventually Magdalene, after, great suffering, "finds salvation" at Little Gidding. John Davenport had also much to learn and to bear, and the two are finally brought together again with a larger charity on the one side, and a love deepened by years of discipline on the other. The accessories of the story, half imaginative and half historical, fit in admirably with the main plot, and Mrs. Marshall may be congratulated upon having added another to her long list of attractive, and often, as in A Haunt of Ancient Peace, really beautiful, stories.
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