The Press.
London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

THE PRESS, DECEMBER 25, 1858.

the exuberance of animal spirits. Such is a
rough sketch of an irresistible lady-killer, as
portrayed by lady limners. This is the sort of
thing they mistake for individuality and strength
of character, and which they revere until they
elope with a bold dragoon. And what is the
pendant to this interesting creature ? A young
damsel, still in her teens, tall, graceful, self-
willed, motherless, well up in the Greek grammar,
troubled about the origin of evil, partial to Plato,
and an adept at algebraic equations. After this
style are drawn the portraits of the two promi-
nent personages in the novel before us ; and we
heartily desire, for the sake of their fellow-
mortals, that, when two such individuals come
together, they may pair off for the remaining
term of their mutual existence. But it is absurd
to ask for our sympathy for these abortions of the
brain. The lady we should shun were she as beautiful
as Venus, the foam-born ; while as for the gentle-
man, we should certainly decline his acquaintance,
even though he added flute-playing to his other
accomplishments, and could embroider a footstool
as well as dissect a campanula. The true ana-
lytical power is one in which women are sinu-
larly deficient, though they perversely imagine
that in that lies their forte, and thus they are led
into the writing of novels bare of incident,
strained in dialogue, and unnatural in the cha-
racters. Were it not for these three fatal faults,
"An Old Debt" would receive at our hand the
meed of approbation. As it is, we regret to say
that we grudge the time wasted on its perusal.

A Few out of Thousands : their Sayings and Doings.
By Augusta Johnstone. London Groombridge
and Sons.
THE title of this stout and presentable volume is
singularly appropriate. It contains simply a series
of slight water-colour sketches—the mere transcripts
of every-day life in a metropolitan suburb. The sub-
ject, we fear, has long since been worked threadbare,
so that every one of these little stories seems dis-
agreeably familiar. A mere photograph of ordinary
middle-class life can never, under any circumstances,
be invested with much interest. Who can pssibly
sympathize with the loves of a butcher-boy—a great,
coarse, red-faced young fellow, who rides the remains
of a wall-eyed pony as if he were winning the
Derby ? Even Flora, the milliner, scarcely rivets
the attention for ten minutes, especially when it is.
seen from the beginning that she means to return
that tiny gold watch, and marry Pierce Ploughman
after all. The others are still more commonplace
and conventional; and nothing but a stern, uncom-
promising determination to do our duty saved us
from the sweetest slumbers as we plodded through
the four hundred pages devoted to the pointless
lives of sixteen groups of vulgar individuals. Still,
we doubt net that the book may be acceptable as a
Christmas present, on the same principle as " a gift-
horse," and we can conscientiously warrant it to be
free from vice. Indeed, there is a sincere and
honest tone about these otherwise trivial stories that
at le, st commands our respect, though it does not
remove our regret for the feminine, and therefore
ungrammatical, construction of very many of the
sentences.

A Goon WlFE.—Katy made an excellent wife ;
she took home her husband's old mother, and
nursed her with a dutifulness and energy worthy of
all praise, and made her own keen outward faculties
and deft handiness a compensation for the defects in
worldly estate. Nothing would make Katy's black
eyes flash quicker than any reflections on her hus-
band's want of luck in the material line. " She
didn't know whose business it was if she was satisfied.
She hated these sharp, gimlet, gouging sort of men
that would put a screw between body and soul for
money. George had that in him that nobody under-
stood. She would rather be his wife on bread and
water than to take Captain Blatherem's house, car•
riages, and horses, and all—and she might have had
'em fast enough, dear knows. She was sick of
making money when she saw what sort of men could
make it,"—and so on. All which talk did her infi-
nite credit, because at bottom she did care, and was
naturally as proud and ambitious a little minx as
ever breathed, and was thoroughly grieved at heart
at George's want of worldly success ; but, like a nice
little Robin Redbreast, she covered up the grave of
her worldliness with the leave.{ of true love, and sung
a " Who cares for that?" above it.—/Prontlfrs.Stowe's
new Tale," The Minister's Wooing." (Sampson Low,
Son, and Co.) _ _

COUNT MONTALEMBERT'S much spoken-of pamphlet
has lately been sold at Paris with the title printed
reversed, " Edni'L Rus Tabed Nu," par Ed Trebme-
latnom. Masses of the pamphlet, we hear, were
disposed of before the pollee got aware of the trick.