amongst these disappointed adventurers? We will not run the risk; so we shall extract the passage: "Oh, as to an English modern novel, with its my Lord Dukes, and Sir Harrys, and caricatures of the beau monde, I hold its vulgarity and bad taste as secondary only to that of the columns of your newspapers after a drawing-room ;--which announce to admiring Europe, that Lady Alberville wore a train of Pomona green; and that some old withered Marchioness, who has been morally defunct these twenty years, arose from the catacombs in the identical robe of crimson velvet which ought to have been covering her coffin.' We have perhaps had more than enough of fashionable novels,' replied Lord Willersdale: but as the amber which serves to preserve the ephemeral modes and caprices of the passing day, they have their value. They will prove to a following generation what the comedies of Congreve, and Cibber, and Farquhar, have proved to ourselves. It is from the ashes of our long extinguished high-life comedy, that this swarm of triflers has arisen; but it was the bent of public taste which originally called it into existence.' "The worst fault of such productions,' observed the bland and smiling Mr. Vyvyan, is the distortion of their portraiture: the writers or painters generally move in so base a sphere, that their upturned and wondering eyes necessarily disfigure the objects of their art. Were it not for Lady Mary Wortley's contemporary letters, we should accept Richardson's Lovelace as the beau idéal of the fine gentleman of his day; whereas we learn that the whole M. family were regarded at the time as a vulgar outrage upon fashionable life. And lately, the Memoirs of Richelieu, and others of the court of Louis XV. have assured us that the heroes of Marmontel, airy and graceful as they are, have not the slightest affinity with the originals they were intended to delineate.' "That Richardson from his shop, and Marmontel from his mansarde, may have viewed the world of fashion in a disproportionate light, I can well conceive. But ours is the age of aristocratic literature; and such novels as Tremaine, Granby, Pelham-' "Tremaine !—that moralizing dri veller!' interrupted Lady Isabella. "A driveller of aqua fortis !' replied Lord Willersdale. "And Pelham!-with its sparkling conceits, that blind one, as though the pages were dried with diamond dust!" "You did not conclude your obser vation,' said Mr. Edwards to Lord Willersdale, perceiving that Florence had been an attentive listener. "Such novels, and many others, form passing around their writers; and are a a mere reflexion of the scenes hourly valuable addition to our lighter literature. Were the author of Anastasius to favor us with a modern novel, for instance-its lous graphic force, A novel of fashiontruth would necessarily equal its miracu able life does not pre-suppose a tissue of puerile vulgarity."" Is this endurable? Richardson in his shop!' truly! Does Mrs. Gore then really imagine that, when to a reader who had previously been patiently toiling through her pages, she has the imprudence to mention such a name as Richardson- and when at that sound (swearing that flesh and blood can endure it no longer) he springs from his task like the ghost at the cock crow ;-does she really imagine that at such a moment it is the shop' which occurs to his mind as the prin cipal distinction between Samuel Rich ardson and the Honorable Mrs. Gore? But would the reader have ever guessed which of Richardson's characters was to be selected as Mrs. Gore's especial victim? The starched Sir Charlesthe enthusiastic Clementina-the tame Miss Byron-or the paragon Clarissa -any-all of them but Lovelace. -Yet it is Lovelace himself-Lovelace-a portrait which by the bye, while it has been the object of incessant imitation, has never been even approached by any author of an age or any country-Lovelace is the character which is here attainted;-degraded from the dignity of the fine gentleman of his day,'-and remorselessly pelted by the ignominious missiles of such scribblers as Mrs. Goreof all the scribblers that ever adorned envelopes for Princes' mixture, or penned inscriptions for a cheese cake! "The eye that seeketh for instruction why looketh it into the palaces of princes To behold how they have yielded to the ravages of time? The spider is chamberlain at the door of Khosrou, The owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afraisab!" Begging pardon for this involuntary rhapsody, all we mean to say is, that if Hafez had lived in our own day, we could have supplied him with a more striking illustration of the vanity of all things under the sun, than even the mouldering turrets of the proud Parvhis. Alas! poor Lovelace! with his inimitable grace his inexhaustible wit-his bril liant wickedness-whose fascinating lustre turns the laugh against wisdom and puts virtue herself out of countenance: "To this complexion must he come at last?" Can he no longer even be accepted as the fine gentleman of his day? Is it then so absolutely requisite to be a bore? so utterly indispensable to be a fool? 'Surely,' murmured we, while repining at this ruthless sentence; and weeping indignantly over the fragments of the now broken and dishonoured altar, before which our youthful imaginations had so often done homage: surely,' said we in the bitterness of our hearts, his abandoned profligacy, at least, might have atoned for his brilliancy that gallant escapade which Lord Forreston deigned to imitate, might have saved even his wit from damnation; and the broken heart of Clarissa might have covered a multitude of accomplishments.' Well! at least,' continued we, minus est cum aliis versari quam tui meminisse ;' and, indeed, on the calmest consideration, we think we may, for our consolation, undertake to ensure him against ever being mistaken for any of the 'fine gentlemen' manufactured in Mrs. Gore's shop (or boudoir, if she like the name better). His character is one which we would still hope is not to be damned by-we will not say the sneers, (for that would be saying little) but even the imitation of even Mrs. Gore. In the same passage which gave rise to this melancholy apotheosis, Mrs. Gore (as if to prove her sway over the risible as well as the lachrymatory organs) coolly informs us that her novels are the legitimate successors of the plays of Congreve, Farquhar, and the other high-life dramatists of the last age. We honestly confess, that our judicial gravity was altogether upset by this extraordinary case of affiliation. The gallant Plume," exclaimed we, "has indeed 'got a recruit that he little thinks of. Could he but rise from the dead and behold the bantling laid to his charge by Mrs. Gore! Would even' the noble sergeant Kite' be as ready as upon former occasions to accept the vicarious honours of paternity?" But seriously, we cannot tamely connive at the violence here perpetrated upon the memory of the dead by the charges of Mrs. Gore. We know not indeed whether the law of Scotland may contain any clauses which would legitimate the descent of these choice godsends, or authenticate the pedi gree assigned to them by their mother. Perhaps we are to understand the manifesto put forth in their favour by the corporation of the 'blue and yellow' as the fiat of the national Justinian to that effect; yet although it has been confirmed by the confederate authorities of the Westminster tribunal, we shall take leave in the present instance to unfurl our foolscap in defiance of them all; and however unequal the combat may be, we can only say that we are prepared to splinter our quills, and drain the last drop of our ink in maintaining à l'outrance against all comers, the immaculacy of either Congreve or Farquhar quoad any offspring with which Mrs. Gore's muse has as yet presented the public. Before closing our remarks upon these volumes we must say a word or two respecting their moral. We confess, indeed, that in a general way (whatever mischief we may ascribe to the works which have a tendency to inflame the imagination or pollute the taste) we are much inclined to acquiesce in Johnson's ridicule of the notion that the mere logical, technical, professional (if we may so call it) moral, of a story, however perverted, could ever exercise any influence upon the mental constitution of the reader; and we may well add, that he must be indeed a simpleton who can imagine that Mrs. Gore's works could have any effect, good or bad, upon any thing except the patience; but for all this, when we meet in the works of a woman such incidents as these; when we have a married lady of twenty coolly represented as endeavouring to persuade a girl of sixteen to break through the faith of a disinterested attachment, in order to marry her to a hardened libertine of forty; concerning whom, with the exception of his being a lord, her friend knows nothing at all; while she herself only knows that he had attempted (and very nearly succeeded in his attempt) to seduce herself almost during the very honey-moon-when we find her represented as doing all this with so very slight a consciousness of the moral turpitude evinced by such a heartless and abandoned scheme of villainy, we cannot let the circumstance pass without remarking that it is as disgraceful to the sex and rank to which Mrs. Gore belongs, as her literary absurdities are to the literary occupation into which she has so imprudently and ludicrously endeavoured to intrude. We would not, of course, be understood to intcnd by these remarks any only sensation they excite at last is that of extreme astonishment how such a man ever came to take it into his head to turn novelist. The only leaves, in fact, worth cutting in his novels are those filled with the reasonings and reflections, which in all other works of the same description we are accustomed to skip; and the story which he intends for the vehicle is the only nauseous part of the draught. He has talents, in fact, which, though they never can acquire him any other distinction than that of an oddity in the singularly inappropriate department he has selected for their display, might ensure him distinguished success in many others. An oddity, however, he undoubtedly is, amongst the fashionable novelists,' as the analysis we are about to present of the work of his which we last read will sufficiently evince. Mr. Lister, it appears, (we undertake not to account for the circumstance) in drawing the portrait of a nobleman, does not think it sufficient to describe him as a coxcomb, nor even necessary to represent him as a fool. Lord Arlington, therefore, although the hero of a fashionable novel is--will it be believed? a man of honor, sense, spirit, feeling, and accomplishment; a perfect gentleman, in short, in every respect. He falls in love with a young lady, who is represented as extremely amiable and unaffected, notwithstanding her labouring under the original sin' of noble birth. The noble Earl also, her father, though doubtless every inch an Earl, is yet for all that a gentleman; and the countess her mother, in despite of her coronet, appears to be ladylike and high-minded enough to be qualified -bold as the assertion may seem-to grace the board and boast the name of any Mrs. Tomkins or Jenkins in the land. We have said enough to show that Mr. Lister's innovations upon the established routine of his clique, are such as evince a spirit of boundless daring and fearless eccentricity. But (as if by that fatal law of our fallen nature which has proverbially connected genius with insanity) it appears to have been destined from the days of Cassandra downwards, that the choicest gifts of "the God of Light and Life" should be clogged with a reservation sufficient to render them utterly valueless. Even so, we grieve to say, after all the pains which Mr. Lister's imagination must have endured in giving birth to such monstrous productions as noblemen of sense, and countesses of honor, they are all virtually thrown away; being introduced upon the stage apparently for no earthly purpose but to play the fool. Lord Arlington, as we have mentioned above, is represented as in love with a young lady every way suited to him; and, indeed, if we can believe all that we are told respecting the class she belongs to, every way unsuited to every other member of it. We were, therefore, specially anxious for the marriage, but we knew of old that the course of true love never does run smooth;' probably alas! because it is only to be met with in the realms of the poet and the novelist, whose trade it would soon spoil were it to do so. But though thus prepared to find the stream a little troubled, certainly in all that ever we did hear,' never did we hear of it being ruffled after such a fashion as this. The earl and countess being rather poor, are afraid of its being thought that they want to catch' Lord Arlington, and therefore caution their daughter to behave coldly towards him. He, on observing this demeanour, is naturally surprised and becomes more distant in his own manner; while a certain Sir Gerald Denbigh-a sort of an abstract mischief maker-steps in, and, apparently for no earthly purpose, tells a whole budget of lies to widen the breach between the lovers, of whom the one is represented as his friend, and the other certainly not as his enemy. Thus, in short, without the shadow of a quarrel-without the shadow of a reason for one-both parties continue gradually backing out of the attachment, until the whole affair is broken off, and terminates in a manner which reminds us of a farce we have somewhere seen, where a couple of bashful lovers being left by their guardians to make acquaintance with each other, continue to retreat reciprocally; until at length the lady, on summoning courage sufficient to raise her eyes, as she is about to bid the gentleman good morning, discovers that he has anticipated her intention and already quitted the room. This said Sir G. Denbigh, actuated by a similarly inscrutable purpose, endeavours to marry Lord Arlington to Miss Julia Saville, who also favours his intention from a more intelligible, and we fear, more ordinary view. In plain English, she intends to marry Lord Arlington for the benefit of a certain Mr. Beauchamp, her lover. Lord Arlington falls into the snare, and would have been caught This but for a fortunate misfortune. leads us to the detail of an under-plot of inexpressible absurdity. The late Lord Arlington having been killed accidentally by a Mr. Holcroft, who had been out shooting with him, in consequence of Mr. H.'s reluctance to confess, a person of inferior rank had been so far involved in suspicion as to be obliged to retreat to America. This scapegoat suddenly re-appears in London during the period of Lord Arlington's suit to Miss Saville, and brings with him a Yankee claimant to the Arlington estate, in the person of a pretended descendant of the late lord's elder brother, who had been wrecked on the coast of America. The consequence of this stratagem is a law suit, which turns out unfavourably to the hero; and from the manner in which Miss Saville and her relations afterwards treat him, he is induced to look a little more closely into her behaviour. He thus soon discovers the intentions of herself and her lover, and the affair is, of course, immediately terminated. In the meantime Mr. Holcroft, who is conscience-smitten at the reiterated injury which his double dealing has thus inflicted upon the house of Arlington, sets off to America, and never rests until he has accumulated sufficient evidence to overturn the pretensions of the pseudo claimant of the Arlington estates. His lordship on the recovery of his property, retires to an estate in the north of England and turns hermit. There is no new thing under the sun,' saith the preacher, and accordingly we find how much in vogue in our own time is that fashion for Young gentlemen to be as black as night which, if we may believe Arthur of Brittany, was no novelty even in the days of King John. Lord Arlington, however, being a very different sort of a man from Lord Mulgrave's misanthrope, spends his hermitship in improving instead of spoiling his demesnes, as well as in storing his mind. This last circumstance is proved to rather more than our heart's content, by almost a whole volume full of very sensible remarks upon literature and politics; many of them indeed so sensible that we never heard any person of sense talking on the same subjects without making the very same. These occur in the course of conversations which take place between himself and an old friend of his, who had come to woo him from his retreat, and endeavour to reconcile him with that first love of his with whom he had quarrelled, by proxy of Sir Gerald Denbigh. The plan adopted by this mediator succeeds in both instances; and with the wedding we take our leave of Mr. Lister-feeling bound to state that his works contain sufficient evidence of talents and good sense, to warrant our sanguine anticipation that he will before long find out that he has hitherto been making an egregious fool of himself. We must add that though Mr. Lister, (being a Whig) has been praised by the Edinburgh Review, yet as he is also a gentleman, and every way free from the offensive and arrogant coxcombery which is breathed by his brethren in the morris dance of fashionthe Westminster Review which praised them, has denominated him the butler of the lackey school of novelists.' had not airs enough to seem a gentleman to these republican critics, perhaps? or it may be, (which indeed is much more likely) they were not half so well pleased with the impressions which his works were likely to convey to the public mind of that character, as they had reason to be with the more congenial portraits of their favourite scribblers. He We half pledged ourselves at the commencement of our task to demonstrate, before its conclusion, the inevitable failure of all works of the present description. And, as we confess, that we should wish to strike at the very root of the tree whose baneful shadow has so long overcast our literature, it may, perhaps, be worth while to redeem our promise. But as we are beginning to be heartily tired of the subject, we wish to be as brief as possible upon it; and, therefore, to avoid all word-catching, let it be distinctly understood what we mean by the term a novel of fashionable life.' We do not mean a novel in which, though the scene may be laid in a particular rank, the subject still consists of those feelings which are common to all ranks. take the term in the sense to which our fashionable novelists' have narrowed it-as a novel whose interest is to consist not in the exhibition of those qualities which characterize the aristocracy in common with the mass of society-but those peculiarities which distinguish the one from the other. Before entering upon this topic, however, we must be allowed to make a few preliminary remarks. We beian nomenclatures, and the ignoble avocations of our homely romance and then honestly ask himself what real difference he can discover "Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee." Locke says that it is an affront to wit to try it by the rules of reason. We may certainly, with a clear conscience, concede to Mrs. Gore's works at least a claim to that attribute of wit. In fact, we feel that in subjecting the motions of her characters to the ordinary canons of criticism, we are acting a part as unconstitutional' as those who would propose to hold a court-martial upon trainband captains. "What? hang a man for going mad? Nevertheless, as we have been at the trouble of dissecting this work, we shall (to use an anatomical phrase)' demonstrate' a little upon its members. We shall even (though with many apologies to Sir Walter Scott for bringing any of his children into juxta-position with Mrs. Gore's) take the liberty of comparing it with some of the masterpieces of art; on the principle that the deformity of any physical lusus naturæ could never be so fully illustrated as by a comparison with the Belvidere Apollo. We intend, then, to exhibit not merely Mrs. Gore's incapacity to write a novel, but her utter ignorance of the very nature of one. Let us take her heroine--Miss Dudley, we mean as a specimen. She is beautiful, of course-a novelist can supply that without troubling the fairies. She is, of course, also possessed of every imaginable accomplishment-they do not cost even the six introductory lessons for which any of our newspaper 'professors' will guarantee' them. She is in love, and has a lover, of course, too-(so much of course,' indeed, that Mrs. Gore barely informs us of it incidentally, and in our analysis we had very nearly forgotten to mention it at all). Moreover, she has (as the man says in the play), like tarwater, all the virtues under heaven could anybody take it.' Now, this is precisely Miss Dudley's case. We cannot 'take' her, notwithstanding her innumerable incomparabilities.— And why not?' Mrs. Gore may, perhaps, ask in her ignorance and astonishment. We answer, simply because we are required to 'take' her upon trust. We have not seen her. In the case of one of Sir Walter Scott's heroines, we feel that we could take the pencil and trace their likeness upon the page we are reading. The beautiful Miss Dudley may be as like one Venus as another, for aught we can tell. Were we, in another world, to meet with any of his characters (from Lucy Ashton down to Jeannie Deans) we should walk up to them as to old acquaintances. Should we know the accomplished Miss Dudley from accomplished Eve' herself? The persons whom Sir Walter introduces to our notice may not beindeed they never are-such absolute paragons as Mrs. Gore's, but-such as they are-are they not our own familiar friends-and, as such, must they not be far more interesting to us than all the vague and abstract perfections of the whole host of angel and archangel, cherubim and seraphim, all put together? As for Miss Dudley, much the better for herself; she may be highborn and rich-so be accomplished-de mieux en mieux, as Lord Forreston would say, but what affair of ours is it? On the other hand, she may be poor (and, for aught we care, she may go to the poorhouse); she may be 'crazed with care or crossed in hopeless love.' she may "Then let the stricken deer go weep;" what can we be expected to care about the matter? She has never made us her confidants. We have never seen the lovers meet-we have never been allowed to listen at the keyhole; even the mysteries of the post-office have been kept sacred from us. We sympathize with Sir Walter Scott's characters, because, long before any demands are made upon us for our sympathy, they have become such intimate friends that we are no longer able to withhold it; but can we be expected to care a straw for the joys or sorrows of personages whose very existence is to us a mere on dit? Now, we are not at present quarrelling with Mrs. Gore for not being equal to the creation of a real character. To expect anything of the sort from her would be to come within one degree of her own stupidity; but she has not even attempted it. is, perhaps, well that she has not; because, being a mere bore, she could only, like all other bores, have become still more insufferable from her more strenuous efforts to be interesting.— It |