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

1264

to have had the least turn for abstract science of
any kind. He had a great liking for burlesque
literature, and the present biographer has dragged
to light some parodies, written about 1796, on
the Rosa-Matilda novels of the day, which are
amusing enough in extract, but which must have
been tedious to read through as the originals
themselves. Of Beckford's moral character, the
writer of this "Life" has not chosen to say any-
thing. Rightly or wrongly, tastes were imputed
to him which would have made him consider the
oration which Phtedrus read to Socrates under
the plane-tree a useful piece of rhetoric ;—and
the silence shown on this head both by his
friends and the present biographer is ominous.
We should be only too glad to think that Beck-
ford's memory could be relieved from such
charges, but it is simply a piece of impertinence
in the writer to imagine that they are to be disbe-
lieved because he declines to meet and refute them.
Such a proceeding only stamps them deeper than
before.—Beckford is said to have been profusely
charitable, and to have exacted secrecy from the
recipients of his bounty as the price of his assist-
ance. We are glad to hear all the good that can
be said of him. What he might have been had
he been a poor man instead of a Caliph, with a
judicious instead of a too indulgent mother, it is
impossible to tell, but gifts were his which might
have insured him a brilliant and perhaps a use-
ful career. As it is, we close the biography with
a feeling that no man ever had so much money
and such opportunities who employed both to
purposes so wasteful and so selfish.

An Old Debt. By Florence Dawson. Two Vols.
London : Smith, Elder, and Co.
THE cynical philosopher who observed that the
psychological part of love begins with the first
sigh and ends with the first kiss would have read
this novel with pleasure. No "two dangling
cherries " sip " the nectar of the lip " until two-
thirds of the lovelorn tale have been completed,
and even then the ceremony is surreptitiously
performed in the presence of the maiden's younger
brother. On two occasions, however, the lady's
hand receives a chaste salute, each time from
a different gentleman, and once she herself reci-
procates the favour. And yet both volumes are
filled with love-passages, but after the manner
of a game at cross-purposes. It can hardly be
said that there is any plot, and still less can we
allude to the incidents, unless we take into ac-
count the dismal hour spent in a thunderstorm

upon the Lake of Geneva, or Lord Convngford's
narrow escape from slipping down the bank.
What, then, it will be asked, is the purport of
the tale ? Briefly this, gentle but inquisitive
reader,—to exhibit the feminine faculty of ana-
lyzing impossible characters. " Impossible,"
perhaps, is too strong a term. There are calves
with five legs and cats with two tails: why then
may there not be such a moral phoenix as Edward
Young—such a griffin as Ellen Scudamore ? The
question is unanswerable ; but still such cha-
racters are too exceptional to belong to the legi-
timate province of sober fiction. All female
writers are more or less liable to fall into this
great error. They invent a composite monster,
and then attempt to dissect it as if it were a
healthy and normal creation. A bachelor weary
of the freedom of celibacy might turn to most
profitable account the insight thus afforded into
the undercurrent of maidens fancies. He has
obtained the key to their heart, or at least their
imagination, for he knows what constitutes their
beau-ideal of a squire of dames. They care not
for the giant frame, the stalwart arm, the reck-
less spirit, or the love of strife. Their prefix
chevalier is precisely the sort of man who is re-
garded by his own sex with indifference, bor-
dering on ill-defined pity or contempt. lie is
usually of a slight build, lithe, active, tender-
hearted, and morally courageous. Of course he
utters aloud the responses in church with devout
feeling and with an unctuously musical voice.
He is also a double-first at Oxford, a calm, pro-
found thinker, and a perfect Stoic. He is like-
wise an indefatigable botanist, deeply sensible of
the mystic virtues of Monandria, Moncecia,
Monogynia, and particularly addicted to gather-
ing the modest flowerets which blush unseen on
lofty crags or in woodlands wild. Above all, he
must look with unbending gravity on the foibles
of his fellow-creatures, and be always ready with
a short sententious reflection calculated to check