The Sun.
London, England, 1855-03-26 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

,
MR. WARREN'S CHEAP EDITION.
Works of Samuel Warren, D.C.L., F.R.S. Vole.
If., 111., IV. Blackwood and Sons.
The earliest announcement of this elegant and
popular reissue of the writings of Mr. Warren, we
well remember to have been hailed by ourselves,
not many months ago, in the columns of this news-
paper, with no small degree of satisfaction. .A.
little later, and the completion of the first volume
enabled us to congratulate at once author, pub-
lishers, and subscribers upon the justification of
the hopes, each in their separate capacity might
have originally entertained at the time when the
prospectus of the reprint made its welcome appear-
mice in advertisement. That initial instalment of
the cheap republication of his writings comprised
the whole of those remarkable effusions which first
attested the originality of the genius Which has
since then won for the learned Recorder of Hull
' his elevated and extended reputation in literature.
It embraced within the limits of a single volume
the entire series of those powerful and affecting
narratives, known long since so widely and fami-
liarly as the "Passages from the Diary of a late
Physician." A production which, already, time
seems to have ripened into a classic—and one
which experience tells us may be reverted to with
nearly the same certainty of former emotions being
thereby revived, as when the Student of Art revisits
some old gallery adorned with familiar masterpieces,
pictures he knows perhaps by heart, and yet the
beauties of which he is well aware he may repents°
repeatedly only with accessions of pleasure—here
some weird landscape of Salvator, here again some
visage grim and sombre in the darkening shadows
clouded over the canvass by the brush of Rem-
brandt. It is thus, literally, with the pathetic
incidents recounted by Mr. Warren in that first
outpouring of his imagination. There is scarcely
anything of extravagance in the comparison we
have here selected, as illustrative of the effect pro-
duced upon- the mind and heart of the appreciative
even by its reiterated contemplation. Every one
cannot but perforce testify the truth of this who
happens to bear in recollection merely the more
prominent figures and the more conspicuous linea-
ments depicted in those inimitable sketches--
sketches produced with a few rapid hut sufficient
touches-from the luminous pencil guided by the
master hand of the young romancist. That exqui-
site love-story in miniature, for example, relating
the life and death of the victim of " Consumption.
That ghastly and appalling memento of the
"Man about Town." That most touching and
bewitching delineation of the lady smitten with
" Cancer. And, among the more tragic limnings,
the oddest and drollest little gleams of fun, the
most bizarre and fantastic celebrations of ridicu-
lousness—the wight with the " Turned Head," or
thb unfortunate with the Toothache, swelling gum
and cheek to the size of au apple-dumpling. Alto-
gether, it was tree, the book had become, by the
aid of edition after edition, familiar to thousands
of our reading population, long before the present
reissue was announced as about to make its ap-
pearance. Its original impressions had, years be-
fore, grown respectably yellowed with age awl
dogs-eared with hard usage at circulating libraries
elsewhere than at Brighton or Cheltenham. Occa-
sionally a second-hand copy of the work might be
picked up by a lucky chance among the dirty trea-
sures and gilt-edged rubbish of a casual bookstall.
But a really good and cheap reissue still re-
mained to the mass of book- worms what the
puff-advertisers call a desideratum. Besides,
almost every other writer of any note whatever
was having his effusions supplied at the most mo-
derate cost imaginable to the throng of buyers
called forth by series after series of popular and.
purcha,seable publications. For a shilling or two
a railway traveller could drop into his side pocket,
together with his damp copy of the Times, a story
by Dickens or an essay by Macaulay. He could wile
away the tedium of a long journey at the tail of a
steam-engine not merely by poring over the " latest
news " in The Sun, or by laughing over the
"newest jokes" in Punch, but by delivering him-
self up a willing prey to the magic toils woven
about him by Bulwer Lytton and other masters
of the imaginative. It was but reasonable, there-
fore, it was but what was right, and sooner or
later, inevitable, that the " Works .of Samuel
Warren " should b 3 placed within reach of the
public in like manner—works which had al-
ready by their own intrinsic merits acquired cele-
brity for their author, not merely at home, but far
and wide over the European Continent. Thanks
to the recognition by the publishers of the advisa-
bility of this reissue of the writings of Mr. War-
ren, those writings have now been supplied to the
book trade cheaply, portably, and abundantly.
As many as four volumes have by this time ap-
peared—to attest the worth of the series as a collec-
tive republication. Volume One we have already
noticed—the volume comprising the whole of
the " Diary of a Late Physician." Volumes Two
and Three followed soon afterwards—containing a
carefully revised reprint of " Ten Thousand. a
Year," one of the most celebrated novels of the
age, 4ud among all his works Mr. Warren's un-
doubted masterpiece. How vividly we recall to
mind the period of its original, and then strictly
anonymous, appearance. dow well we remember
the eagerness with which we all looked out, month
after month, for the new chapters of it in Black-
wood's Magazine. . How we wondered as to the
secret of the authorship. How the reading of the
story agitated our hearts and imaginations. What
profound elaotions were excited by the astonishing
fluctuations of fortune related, by that unseen,
unknown wizard of the purely fictitious.
What varying sentiments were roused within
us as the tale proceeded. How Completely
we realised the individuality, the positive,
substantial existence, of the different person-
ages introduced. How we sympathised with
Charles Aubrey, and mused, as we followed his
footsteps in that • "strange eventful history," over
the solemnity and grandeur of that noblest spectacle
of the gods—a good man - struggling with misfor-
tune. How we admitted into the sanctuary of our
more idealised affections his sister, the, beautiful
Kate—the -Una in that forest of difficulties. How
we loved the very name of their dear old Yatton—
the end and object of all that frightful and harrow-
ing litigation. The Novel had - long superseded
the Drama, and that novel of " Ten Thou-
sand a Year," wondrously fulfilled in its turn
the ofiiee of the drama as defined by Shakspere.
It was a mirror he up to this nineteenth century
—a mirror reflecting all its motley and contrast-
ing peculiarities, its meanness and its magnificence,
its symmetry and its distortion, its privations and
its luxuries, good and bad, rich and poor; the sordid,
the magnanimous, the patrician, the parasite, the
despicable, the pathetic, the ridiculous. - Scarcely
a grade of society but in it had its appropriate
typo or representative. Scarcely a portion of our
social institutions but was in it, either directly or
indirectly, illustrated. And illustrated, too, so
amusingly, so readily, so satirically, .so attrac-
tively. With what abounding ease the writer
at pleasure speared some "flying lolly" with
the piercing point of his pen-of-aareasm, -or,
reversing his grey goose feather, tickled one
at will into peals of genial and wholesome laughter. ,
How humorously, for instance, he made that
wretched Tittlebat Titmouse. run the gatintlet of
absurdity, from the beginning to the end—from,
the days when ho out-gented gentism, with tb a •
almost equally abominable Huckaback,- to tl le
time of his horrid familiarity with - .the hi gh
and mighty, the Right Hon. the Earl .of Dr ed-
dlington ! Can any of us ever : forget the
wretch -6-- blight
bottl dyeinge-green hisH hair
Have eve, e,eaarenyrilloifi us,°f' forgotten
his astonishing old Tag Rag by driving to the fami-
liar shop, in that emblazoned cab with the high.
stepping horse, and those lavender kid glo yes dain-
tily handling the reins over the lacquered apron t
And then—Oily Gammon ! That Arbaces or every-
day-life. A creation as complete, and vivid, and
immortal as Pococuraute. What genius in the
conception of that one character alone t What
consummate art in every line and tint of its magi-
cal and life-like delineation ! Rernemberingall this,
and much more,
Y regard to ,4 Ten 'Thousand a-
Year," we have reason to felicitate the world at
large nowadays, at our steam-
boat wharves and
railway termini, that any one can henceforth,
if he list, provide himself before staring. on
a journey with some Such literary masterpiece
for just two or three.of the smaller coins in circu-
lation. The compactness of the popular reissue
h(ifall the recognised a collected
Warren's writings may
illustrated by te last
perhapst
h have already made
their appearance. It comprises, in one -thin oc-
tavo,
oel 'ue r e tvolumes form)asof Mbr;
of it which
besides the exquisite and comprehensive dis-
course upon the "Moral
,and Intellectual neve-
' lopment of the Present Ago' —a literary nii crocosin,
in which age rose
mass of - knotiledge is
really wonderfully epitomised and bound logether
by a chain of solemn and elevating reflections—
together with a revised edition of the " Apologue
of the Crystal Palace," accompanied by A. "Preli-
minary Exposition"—the whole of that enthralling
romance "Now and Then," founded upon a tale
of Circumstantial Evidence, the story penned. with
such surprising swiftness between lateen the 20th.
of November and early on the 9th of
.December,
1847, a narrative in which the virtues of old Adau
Ayliffe are so movingly, wisely, and ekquently
celebrated. Volumes like those here particularised
must, we doubt not, be cordially welcome to the
present, as we are fully satisfied they will long
continue to be prized by many a subsequot, ge-.
nerAtivn.