The Sun.
London, England, 1838-03-21 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

MRS. WILBERFORCE AND HER ORPHANS,
Two Volumes, Saunders and Otley, London, 1838.
Mrs. Wilberforce is a tale not sentimental merely, but
ultra-sentimental—to a degree, indeed, that defies all des-
cription and parallel. The heroine is a lady who, left a
widow at an early age, brings up a family of children in a
very respectable, praiseworthy manner, and then, when she
has become a grandmother, marries a second time, for
love ; and while her husband is abroad in Spain, inspires a
wicked, licentious peer, with an ungovernable passion for
her. She, of course, with all the virtue of staid fifty, or
threescore, is horror-struck at his Lordship's presuming to
think her a fit subject for seduction : whereupon his Lord-
ship sends over his attorney, or man of business—who, we
arc assured, is a gentleman of a highly religious turn of
mind—to Spain, with the truly Christian commission to
ferret out old Mrs. Wilberforce's second husband ; stab
him in some bye-road or other ; and then return to England
with the tidings of his death. As a matter of course, the
attorney, being piously given, fulfills this commission ; on
which the wicked peer hastens to inform the widow that
her second husband has gone to look after her first, in
Heaven ; and that he shall feel exceedingly obliged if she
will da him the favour to accept of him as a third She
starts, swoons, " feels very sick"—and no wonder, poor
thing, for a declaration of love at her age might turn the
stomach of an ostrich !—but at last asks his Lordship to
allow her a year for deliberation. Well, the year is
granted, and then the kind-hearted old soul, who of course
is by this time as grey as a badger, marries Lord Elmbridge
—such is the name of this singular aristocrat—and lives
with him for a considerable period ; not happily, however, we
regret to say, for his Lordship soon gets tired of her, and
resolves on procuring a divorce ; but being unexpectedly
shot in a duel, the scheme of the divorce falls, like himself,
to the ground. Soon after his decease, the whole story of
the murder of Mrs. Wilberforce's second husband in Spain
comes out ; the murderers are brought to trial, found
guilty, and the chief assassin, 111olesworth, puts an end to
his existence by drinking off a bottlefull of rank poison, pro-
cured for him by his own affectionate wife! Matters being
thus comfortably and satisfactorily settled, nothing remains
but for the author to get rid of his heroine, which he ac-
cordingly does by a very accomodating fit of sickness,which,
seizing her towards the close of the second volume, kills her
as dead as mutton in the 7th line of the 302 d page. It is
gratifying to state that she expires in excellent spirits, at a
good old age, in the hope of again meeting her three hus-
bands in that blissful region where they " neither marry,
nor are given in marriage !" Such are the leading events
of this surprizing story, which, in its line, is as great a lite-
rary curiosity as even the Rev. Mr. Dillon's account of
" the Lord Mayor's voyage to Oxford." The subordinate
characters of the tale are equally in keeping with that of
the chief one, Mrs. Wilberforce. Baron Trumpery is a
fine specimen of a polished Chimpanzee ; and delivers a
discourse on female chastity to Mrs. W. and her married
daughter Selina, which we have great pleasure in saying, is
infinitely more original than that celebrated passage on the
same subject in Milton's " Comus." As for Lady Wedge-
bury, she resembles nothing " either in heaven above, the
earth beneath, or the waters under the earth," and ought
therefore to have been married to Doctor Brittleback,
whose idiosyncracy is equally peculiar. With regard to
the moral reflections scattered throughout this eccentric
novel, strict justice compels us to state that they are occa-
sionally marked by the profoundest sagacity. What, for
instance, can be reore sage than the author's observation
that " one crime leads to another"—an axiom of re-
markable acuteness, to which the only possible objection
we can urge is, that it has been manifestly suggested by
Thornton's sententious aphorism in Pelham, that " one
shoulder of mutton drives down another !" We take leave
of " Mrs. Wilberforce and her Orphans" with the respect
due to their many amiable qualities, merely premising by the
way, that the character of the former, novel as it confessedly
is, is not altogether original, for Ninon de L'Enclos pos-
sessed the same extraordinary powers of attraction to as
great, and even greater, an extent than Mrs. W., having
broken the hearts of three French sweethearts when she
was past eighty years of age, and was not only a grand-
mother, hut a great-grandmother !