The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-15 00:00:00

HOBBLEDEHOY!

The person who had admitted them was a boy who had just
arrived at that period of life when boys are most obnoxious.
He had ceased to be a boy pure and simple, and not yet pre-
sumed to call himself a young man. Rejected on one side by
his juniors, who found him arrogant and despotic, mooting
strange and unorthodox theories with regard to marbles,
and evincing supreme contempt for boys who were not
familiar with the latest vaticination of the sporting pro-
phets in Bell's _Life and the Sunday Times; and flouted
on the other hand ,by his seniors, who offered him half-
pence for the purchase of hardbake, and taunted him with
base insinuations when he was seized with a sudden fancy
for going to look at the weather in the middle of a strong
cheroot—the hobbledehoy sought vainly for a standing-
place upon the social scale, and finding none, became a
misanthrope, and wrapped himself in scorn as in a mantle.

For a purely comic delineation, however, com
mend us to Mr. Sigismund Smith, as we have him
here pourtrayed for our amusement, time and again,
in various parts of these three volumes, by the ex-
hilarating pen of Miss Braddon. It is peculiarly
and especially as a Novel of Character
that " The Doctor's Wife" is remarkable. It is
not in the popular acceptation of the term, in any
way a Sensation Story. Nay, as already indicated,
it is for the most part the reverse of a Sensational
story—being, to some extent (that is through the
medium of Sigismund Smith's character), comically
sarcastic upon the matter of what is called, for the
nonce, Sensationalism. The chief, prevailing, para•
mount merit of The Doctor's Wife as a work of art
in imaginative literature, being the highly appre-
ciated and subtly diminutive delineation of The
Doctor's Wife—that is, of the Doctor's Wife con-
sidered, not as a Book. but as a Character
—lsabel Slsaford is the maiden name of
this new heroine of domestio romance. Her
father, ostensibly at the outset a barrister, not
only briefiese but hard up, eventually turns out
to be no barrister at all, but a low scoundrel who
begins life with systematic forgery and ends his
career by perpetrating a brutal assassination.
Separated from her father upon the first
detection of his forgeries—separated afterwards
from the rest of her family, from her common-
place stepmother and those three vulgar cube
her half-brothers—lsabel, after the fashion of
so many young girls who are doomed, somehow
or another, as best they can, to make their own
way in the world entirely for themselves, becomes
a governess. It is while she is a governess that the
young Provincial Surgeon (Mr George Gilbert)
—from her marriage with whom the book takes
its title—proposes fur her hand, and without
very much difficulty on her part, but also, it should
be said, without, on her side, one particle of
love, obtains it. George Gilbnt's character
and home =ve cannot but regard as very pitilessly
delineated. Insomuch so that we can hardly for the
life of us very much blame Isabel for becoming bored
almost to death by the tedium of both the one and
the other. Surely, never was there a less home-like
house-room than that horrid parlour at the surgeon's
dwelling. And as for the young surgeon's insa-
tiable appetite for rank spring onions and
knobby, prongy radishes as a relish with the
cheese at supper well, really, it becomes
even to the reader of the tale, a some-
thing just simply insufferable. George, how-
ever, the onion-munching surgeon at Gray bridge—
a good-natured comely young buxuna animal, with-
, out two ideas worth speaking of in his head—is not