The Press.
London, England, 1854-09-09 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

the work is only a novel, and not an auto-
biography. Literary celebrities close their
careers with recounting their own stories, but
Mrs. Trollope continues to write with so
mul•h talent that we should be sorry to think
that we were to have no more novels from her
fertile brain. She has two distinct styles in
her fictions : in one she aims at broad touches,
and pushes the ridiculous to the verge of the
mere grotesque, trusting to her sustained
fluency and humorous power of narration fir
hiding the defects incidental to that particular
school of composition ; in the other she aims
at repase, and preserves a rather subdued
tone. The latter style is that which she has
adopted in her present volumes. In every
page we recognise the practised literary me-
chanician ; the puppets go through their parts
with great lifelike activity and dexterity of
change; hut, though there is even more than
the usual quantity of clever writing in this
novel, we miss that freshness and creative
fi,rce which are required to produce tile first-
rate in fiction.

Charlotte Morris, the heroine of this tale,
becomes, with her banker father, a resident in
Gloucester-place, and the sole object of her
ambition is to get into society ; and a con-
siderable portion of the story is written in the
style known as " the silver-fork school." The
small follies and petty ambition of the middle
classes, and the absurdities of second-rate
gentility as it apes aristocratic habits, are for
the thousandth time laid bare. We confess
that we are tired of such constant harping on
one string. Charlotte Morris, herself, has
much of the Barnaby blood in her, though her
pedigree is not stated ; and a long acquain-
tance with her hard, coarse character is not
edifying or pleasing. But, with great inge-
nuity, our practised authoress has interwoven
a second story, recounting the romantic adven-
tures of Zela Richards, the charming daughter
of a portrait-painter; and by far the most
agreeable part of this fiction is the history of
poor Zela's trials, and pains, and final happiness.
The character of Richards, the portrait-painter,
seems sketched from real life, and perhaps
two or three originals were selected for the
points. The, heroine, in her diary, thus re-
counts her first acquaintance with Mr. Rich-
ards

" Is that showy lady only the wife of a portrait-painter?"
I exclaimed with more naïveté, I suspect, than tact, for my
handsome partner, Mr. Wilson, laughed in a manner
rather too genuine, I thought, to be flattering. However,
he immediately replied, " Oh ! I understand you perfectly,
and I am by no means astonished at your astonishment.
By the time you have added another lustre to your expe
rience, my dear young lady, you will have discovered that
there are many and various claims for fashionable notoriety.
Mr. Richards is certainly rather above par as a clever painter
of portraits, but his fashionable notoriety does not arise
from that."
" From what does it arise T" said ',looking innocently in
his face, hut determined with all my innocence to find out
why Mrs. Knighton paid more attention to his vulgar wife
than almost to any other lady in the room.
" More from his caricatures, I think, than from his
portraits," replied my partner, nodding his head as he
spoke, with an air of great intelligence.
" Do you mean that he draws caricatures of the people
he meets in society ?" said I. " Do you mean that he wins
his way to fame and fashion by handing to one set of his
friends, grotesque likenesses of another set ?" I added
with very genuine astonishment.
" Something like it," he replied, laughing. " People in
general are very fond of seeing good caricatures of their
friends."
But this gentleman, it appears, had another
way of getting into society. He is represented
as a sort of Brummagem Theodore Hook, a
facetious extemporiser of doggrel verses The
heroine thus sketches him in the scene of his
triumphs :

I no longer wonder that Mr. Richards should be a per-
feet drawing-room idol. Whichever way he moves, wit
and frolic seem to move after him. Over and over again,
last night, I observed a group looking the very perfection
of dulness. lint lo ! the very instant Richards approached
them, the aspect of every one seemed to change as if by
magic. And what a relief it was to see the crowd that
gathered r3nnd the pianoforte when at length got him to
• ' •be - the dear delightful man has