to follow the wheels of progress; possessing also the courage and the skill to hold the mirror before the face of folly, and to paint the silly lineaments of its deformity; we scarcely need wonder at the tendency of her mind to this species of labour, in a “field which is the world.”
Miss Browne’s literary career is however, comparatively, but just begun. The efforts of her pen have been very favourably received by the public, and these tones of kindness and welcome from the popular voice, encourage the hope that hers has not been an adventurous launch amidst the shoals and breakers of authorship.
Miss Browne’s style of writing contains many popular elements as well as intrinsic beauties. In portraying the incidents of actual life, in depicting scenes of familiar occurrence in the family or the neighbourhood, she has few equals, and no superiors. That sterling common sense which strips off the mask of frivolity and conventionalism, which falls with withering and mortifying weight upon false pretensions, which holds up to derision and contempt those hollow and heartless principles and practices, which obtain in so-called “fashionable” society, lends a peculiar charm of satisfaction to the perusal of her tales. Of these qualities her “Town and Country,” “Marrying for the Parish,” and “Looking up in the World,” furnish eminent examples. No one can rise from the perusal of these excellent life-pictures, having fairly imbibed their spirit and meaning, without a thrill of gratification at the well-ordered finale, and its admirable point and truthfulness.
She is playful, pathetic, serious, earnest, full of life and intensity, never prosaic, never tedious, never common-place, deeply imbued with the religious, largely read in that school of sensibility which enables her to sympathize with all forms of human sorrow and suffering; her writings, consequently, find their way directly to the heart and bosom of the reader. In argument, she is clear, persuasive, and convincing; in satire, keen, and cutting, and a remarkable coherency and unity runs through the whole, so as to make it a difficult thing to isolate a passage in any given article, on which something antecedent or subsequent does not materially depend; every passage is linked with its neighbour so necessarily and appropriately, that an extractor finds his task a perplexing one. Harmony and felicity of diction is another invariable attribute of Miss Browne’s style of composition. Her command of language is so affluent, that it sometimes insensibly leads her into a redundancy of epithet tending toward the superlative; but the finished elegance of her periods compensates amply for this defect, which time and experience will eradicate.
In Miss Browne’s religious writings appears an element of depth and fervour which has made them decided favourites with the serious and devout. Her little volumes for the young are replete with pathos, tenderness, and truthfulness, conveying lessons of piety and virtue in a manner peculiarly
