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

LITERATURE.

Reuben aledNeott ; or, Vie Coming Man. By M.
W. Savage. One Vol., pp. 400. Chapman and
Hall,

Three capital novels I‘er Savage has written in
his time—The Bachelor of the Albany, Reuben
Medlicott, 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 manitestly 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. He 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 Swage'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 since, 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 as
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 issue of "Reuben Medlicott" as the
first edition of it, instead of recognising it to be (as
it really is) simply a reprint. Produced nearly 20
years ago, thestory here under notice is descriptive of
English society in 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, mis.
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," Rueben enters upon life
vaguely, dreamily, as one of those " curled
darlings," WllO 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 impracticable—
peilanthropist. He has a rather dull-witted cou❑-
try parson for his father, and a bine-stookinged,
green-spectacled, soi-disant strongenainded, but, in
honest trutb, 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 Corn-
ing Man." He is " everything by starts and nothing
long." He gets into difficulties. He marries a Qaa-
keress and himself turns almost a Quaker. 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 Rueben Medli-
cott is this—that he has an Uncle I The Very
Reverend Dean Wyndham is the character
of the Book. In hia 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 Dean 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 rapt
affectio❑ for his new-born son—every particu-
lar recounted in regard to the old Dean
we read of with a quiet bat intense amusement.
The character ie a creation. It lives i❑ our remem
brance 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 wbo
never does Come out (worth speaking of) after a
—Reuben Medlicott.

The Small House at Allington. By Anthony
Trollope. New Edition. Oae Vet. pp. 598.
Chapman and Hall.
The popularity of Mr Anthony Trollope, as now-
adays the foremost among our fashionable novelists,
receives in this handsome volume a new and season-
able illustration. It seems comparatively only the
other day that "The Surat! Rouse at Allington,"
as a serial story, drew to its close in the
Cornhill Magazine appearing,
as it did
then, immediately afterwards, in a separate
form, es two elegant volumes, containing
bti rapidly exhausted,
within them the whole of Mr, Millais' embellish-
ments. Scarcely, however, has it appeared in that
snoreedition
ofs t lt
whole of the original
a new, cheaper, and compactor iaeue of the tale
becomes requisite according to
the view of the
c o
publishers, yhegwaiosrek when,
having
the
beep
and, as a matter of course, appears
'Accordingly. As a gitt book it comes
out,
now, precisely at the right
momeet, before
Christmas and the New Yecir. In some
respects it is one of
-e0 very cleverest
among Mr. T the
egetches of commonplace
people of the middle class, interspersed here and
there, very sparsely, with specimens of the Upper
Ten Thousand. About the only really charming
character in the story is that of the heroine—a
good, sweet-tempered, womanly, thoroughly Eng-
lish girl. As to the hero, or rather, we should say,
as to the Iwo heroes of the book—well, they are
simply detestable. For our
°cirri part we should
find it difficult to decide which of them in his own
peculiar way is the more detestable—whether
Adolphus Crosbie or Johnny ,Eames. Eich of them
is, to our thinking, and in the most unmitigated
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 not nearly such an ass.
Adolphus Croshie, however, is a wretched
vulgarian, tufelounter, toadeater, and all that sort
of thing. Insomuch that it becomes a gratifica-
tion to the reader to learn all about the slights,
indignities, insults, and what not, showered in the
later half of the work upon his devoted head by
one or another—hove he gets punched on the head,
kicked, indulged with the egreeahie little luxury of
a black eye, and so forth—even though the
puncher, the kicker, and the black eye manufac-
turer happens to be Johnny. As for the
aristocrats of the tale, they are happily very
exceptionally bad specimens of the class—other-
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 grans home as could be found anywhere in
the three kingdoms, even in the lowest of the back
slums of the metrapolis. Johnny's friend, again,
the fat, vulgar, old earl, would pas, muster
almost anywhere, we Photld 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 pople are odious, Cradle and the
Lnpexes being especially or superlatively odious—
the Government cffices, the boards at those 810110,
old Hal) Scoter, end the like, are depicted
in Mr, Anthony Trollope's vary happiest manner: