The Atlantic Monthly, page 239 by Various Authors
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ows uncommon power and is entitled to high praise. His portraits are animated, life-like, and individual. Father Terence is drawn with a firm and skilful touch. The task which the author prescribed to himself--to present an ecclesiastic without learning, without intellectual power, without enthusiasm, and with the easy habits of a careless and enjoyable temperament, and yet who should be respectable, and even venerable, by reason of the soundness of his instincts and his thorough right-heartedness--was not an easy one; but in the execution he has been entirely successful. We cannot but surmise that he has met sometime and somewhere a living man with some of the characteristic traits of Father Terence. Father Ignatius, the conventional type of the dark, wily, and dangerous ecclesiastical intriguer, is an easier subject, but not so well done. He is a little too melodramatic; and we apply with peculiar force to him a criticism to which all the characters are more or less obnoxious, that he is too constantly and uniformly manifesting the peculiar traits by which the author distinguishes him from others. Father Debree and Mrs. Barré are drawn with powerful and discriminating touch, and we recognize the skill of the writer in the fact that we had read a considerable portion of the novel before we had any suspicion of the former relations between them. We may here say that we think that the women who may read this work will want to know, a little more fully and distinctly than the author has seen fit to tell, what were the causes and influences which led to the severing of those relations. We cannot state our meaning more clearly, without doing what we think should never be done in the review of a new novel, and that is, telling the story, and thus removing half the impulse to read it. Skipper George and his household, and the smuggler Ladford, are very well drawn,--not distinctly original, and yet with distinctive individual traits, which sharp observation must, to some extent, have furnished the author with. < previous next >