The Press.
London, England, 1857-11-07 00:00:00

Knightly for Northamptonshire, a Littleton
for Staffordshire ; Walter Long sat for Lud-
gershall (Wilts), a Rolle for Devon ; two Rus-
sells sat for Tavistock, Sir James Thynne for
Wiltshire, the Verneys for Wycombe and
kylesbury, a Vivian for Tregony. The Long
Parliament had a Sir John Packington,
Robert Cecil, a Sir John Ramsden, a Lord
Edward Howard, and many other names
borne then as now by men of station and
honour; and the catalogue shows the fixity of
our social system, and how purely political
was the revolution in the seventeenth century,
as distinguished from the French convulsion,
where opinions, manners, and landed property
were fundamentally overturned.

True to Nature. A Novel. Two Volumes.

London : Hurst and Blackett.

THIS is a tale of modern domestic English
life, gracefully and prettily told. The story is
simple enough, and affords little scope for
artistic treatment. Sir Hugh and Lady Mon.
tagu are the model father and mother of four
more or less model daughters, whose matri-
monial fortunes are sketched with some clever-
ness. Frances marries a foolish baronet with
a good fortune, and abandons herself to the
frivolities and vanities of London society.
Margaret is unaccountably fascinated and won
by a vulgar manufacturer, of the Manchester
school of politics, who is stingy and brutal.
Clarice, a young lady with ideas as romantic as
her name, marries a handsome but brietless
young barrister of the proper novel-hero
species, whose brother, a distinguished Indian
officer, undesignedly obtains the affections of
her younger sister Lucy, a charming young
lady, whose love is not returned by the uncon-
scious warrior; as how should it have been,
when a gipsy woman had foretold to that
young lady a life of hopeless celibacy ? and we
all know that the predictions of those inspired
Bohemians never fail to be realised—at least
in novels. Mrs. Herbert Disbrowe, the bar-
rister's helpmate, had, however, before she
became his wife, refused the tender and re-
spectful offer of marriage made to her by Mr.
Latymer, an old bachelor friend of her father,
a man of large property, high fatnily, and noble
character, but, alas ! unable to inspire with
reciprocal love the pretty young poetess, who
had already given her heart to his penniless
but goodlooking guest from London. After
struggling with poverty, and smarting from
the selfish patronage of her sister, Lady
Selwyn, till her spirits began to fail and her
husband's health to sink, the barrister's
household are suddenly not only relieved from
pecuniary distress, but elevated to sudden
wealth by the death of her old ad►uirer, who
leaves all his large estates to his little idol, in
spite of the machinations of his heir at law,
Mr. Temple—a proper melodramatic villain,
who undergoes the shame, defeat, and expo-
sure suitable to his crimes, and dies a miser-
able outcast in Italy.
The whole work, however, is not devoted to
the history of the Montagus. The loves of
Colonel Disbrowe, the brother of the poetess's
briefless husband, and Miss Vivian will be
considered by most novel-readers the most
interesting portion of the book. Miss Vivian
is a young lady of great beauty and enormous
wealth, who is eagerly sought after by the
fascinating villain Jasper Temple. She seorn-
fully rejects his suit, and hills deeply in
love with the handsome colonel from India.
Maddened with disappointment at the failure
of his scheme for re-establishing his fallen
fortunes, and smarting with rage atid jealousy,
Temple puts a paper into Colonel Disbrowe's
hands, purporting to be a letter which Miss
Vivian had addressed some time previously,
when almost a schoolgirl, to a young man
named Seyton who had paid his addresses to
her. The colonel—a proud wooer, who conla
no more than Montrose bear " a rival near his
throne "—carries the accusing document to
Miss Vivian, insists on knowing if she acknow-
ledges its genuineness, and, on her meekly
owning that she was the author of the missive,
abruptly, and we think somewhat brutally,
breaks off his engagement with the poor,
humbled girl. In defence of his conduct,
however, it must be stated that she had
solemnly assured him that he was the first