The Sun.
London, England, 1864-12-19 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Reuben Mecllicott ; or, The Coming Man. By M.
W. Savage. One Vol., pp. 400. Otapman and

Three capital novels 'Ass Savage has written in
his time—The Bachelor of the Albany, Reuben
Mediicott, and The Falcon Family. The first men,
tioned of the three is incomparably the best of them.
Nevertheless, in saying this, we mean no disparage-
ment to the other two, each of which, in its own
peculiar way, is excellent. Upon all three of these
fictions, the author has manifestly bestowed con-
siderable pains, But, when he wrote The Bachelor
of the Albany, he was in the cue—he was in the
vein—he was at his best--inoffensively caustic and
slyly humorous. Several years have expired since
the latest of these three fictions was penned and
published. Since which time, the writer has been
otherwise occupied than in contributing to ima-
ginative literature. Ho has in the interim been
engaged in the responsible labours of jour.
nalism, for several years editing a distin•
guished weekly newspaper the 'conduct of
which has been successively entrusted to men of
letters, critics, poets, politicians—ae distinguished as
Leigh Hunt, Albany Fonblanque, John Forster, Mr
Savage himself, and—since Mr Savage's with-
drawal from the editorial chair—Henry Morley.
By a curious misapprehension on the part of
one of the writers in the Saturday Review,
Mr Savage was formally charged, a week
or two tines, with having been, so to
speak, guilty of a flagrant anachronism, first of
all in having written this book at all, and secondly,
in having published it, when so written, only tie
recently as nowadays, that is in the year of grace,
1864. The fact of the matter being that " Reuben
Medlicott was penned and published a good
many years ago—say as many at the very least as
sixteen or seventeen. The Saturday Review—
altogether unconscious of this, apparently—regard-
ing the present issae of "Reuben Medlicott" as the
first Karim] of it, instead of recognising it to be (as
it really is) simply a reprint. Produced nearly 20
years ago, the story here under notice is descriptive 01
English society is London and in the Provinces, pre.
cisely as it was then—long before the male popula-
tion of England had dreamt of leaving off shaving—
long before the female population had a notion of
distending their petticoats with steel bands, mils*
called crinoline. As a picture of that byegone
period, the story is faithful to a degree, to a t, to a
hair—it is faithful, just within the limits of carica-
ture. " Unstable as water, " Rusben enters upon life
vaguely, dreamily, no one of those " curled
darlings," who seem always in search of—what
they never settle down to—a profession ! He
has his Quaker proclivities. He has an
overwhelming laxity of speech—what Jack calls
" the gift of the gab"---fancying himself an ora-
tor, when he is only, if the truth must be told, an
egregious bore. He goes philandering about the
world as a professed—but wholly inapracticeble—
philanthropist. He has a rather dull-witted coun-
try parson for his father, and a bine-stockinged,
green.spectacled, eoi-dimnt strongaminded, but, in
honest truth, exceedingly narrow-minded fribbler
in arts, sciences, and letters, for his mother.
He imagines himself —and is supposed to
be by his friends and relations—a genius, almost
one might say the genius (of the age)—" The Com-
ing Man." He is " everything by starts and nothing
long." He gets into difficulties. He marries a Qes-
keress and himself turns almost a Q taker. When
in the House of Commons he is for a time one of the
joints in the tail of O'Connell. But—the chief no.
ticeable circumstance in regard to Ruehen Medlis
cott is this—that he has an Uncle I The Very
Reverend Dean Wyndham is the character
of the Book. In his way, he is equal to
Mr. Anthony Trollope's delightful Archdeacon
Greatly. We have never enough of him—any more
than we have of the Archdeacon. The indivi..
duality of Daan Wyndham is_ perfectly realized.
His huge bulk, his immense appetite, his loud voice,
his boisterous and overwhelming manner, his
truculence, his erudition, his prejudices, his passion
for dabbling in bricks and mortar by wholesale
and by retail, his marriage (when between
seventy and eighty years of age) with a pretty
young creature who might have been his
granddaughter, eventually even his rapi
sffection for his new-burn son—every partieu•
tar recounted in regard to the old Dean
we read of with a quiet but intense amusement.
The character is a creation, It lives in our rememn
braise() long after we have closed these amusing
chapters descriptive of the career and fortune, the
adventures and misadventures of the Coming Man
—that Man who is always Coming out but who
never does Come out (worth speaking ot) after a
—Reuben Medlicott.

New Edition, Oue Vol. pp. 598.
The Small Rouse at Allington, By Anthony
The popularity of Mr Anthony Trollope, as now-
adays the foremost among our fashionable noveliets,
Cliemajpl°Len. and Hall.
receivesnew and season-
able
eru day i
tn r
h this handsome :
Tlt eratively only the
h
semml:111 valuate
at Allington,"
o till
sta
as a serial story, drew to its close in the
Cornhill Magazine appearing, as it did
then, immediately afterwards, in a separate
form, as two elegant voiemes,
containing
within them the whole of Air. Millais' embellish-
ments. Scarcely, however, has it appeared in that
more costly guise when, the whole of the original
edition been rapidly exhausted,
a new, of the work having
cheaper, and compacter issue of the tale
becomes requisite according to
the view of the
publishers, and, as a matter of course, appears
kccordibgly. As a gilt book it comes out,
now, precisely at the right
Moment, before
Christmas , and the New
respects it is one of the Year. In same
very cleverest
of commonplace
8 ersed here and
there, very sparsely, with specimens of the Upper
Ten Thousand. About the
only really charming
ap
oopnl ge
ojlf I rt
.11 eTmmi idi dc'Pl ee clasp ke,teittser p
of the heroine—a
character in the story is that
iirlaYther, we should say,
thoroughly Eoge
igioshodg,isrwheetA-tsemtoptehreedh.everzer
as to the two heroes of the book—well, they are
own part we should
fisinmdpiltyddiffiteeuslttabtolectecFidoef which of them in his own
peculiar way is the mere detestable—whether
and in
jAs,dotolphouusr Crosbie or Eames' Each of them
the most unmitigated Johan
sense of the phrase, a snob. But, while Crosbie
is, in addition to that pleasant little peculiarity of
his, a mean-hearted scoundrel—Eames is, besides
being a snob, a bit of a prig
and a bit of a bore.
Upon the whole, therefore, we should rather be
disposed to say that the scoundrel is just a
trifle the more interesting of the twain—he
is at any rate riot neerly such an ass.
Adolphus Crosbie, however, is a wretched
vulgarian, tufthunter, toadeatery e d all that sort
of thing. Insomuch that it becomes a gratifica-
tion to the reader to learn all about the Blights,
indignities, insults, and
later half of the work. upon his devoted head by
gets
one or another—how he punched on the head,
kicked, indulged with the agreeable little luxury of
a black eye, and what not, showered in the
so forth—even though the
puncher, the kicker, and the black eyo alanufec-
turer happens to be Johnny. As for the
aristocrats of the tale, they are happily very
exceptionally bad specimens of the class—othera
wise a speedy revolution might confidently be
looked forward to, Crosbie's father in-law, for
example, is, though wearer upon occasion of a
coronet and a robe of ermine, as brutal a specimen
of the genus hemo as could be found anywhere in
the three kingdoms, even in the lowest of the back
slams of the metropolis. Johnny's friend, again,
the fat, vulgar, old earl, would pass muster
almost anywhere, we should imagine, for a grazier
rather than for an earl. The high and mighty Mr
Palliser, moreover—heir to a dukedom though he
is—weighs miserably upon our remembrance as a
dreadful dullard. The old squire is good, his
crabbed old gardener is excellently good—the.
Burton Crescent people are odious, Cradle and the
Lupexes being especially or superlatively odious—
the Government offices, the boards at those same,
old Ruffle Scuffle, mild the like, are depicted
in Mr. Anthony Trollope's very happiest manner.