The Sun.
London, England, 1853-03-14 00:00:00

BULWER LYTTOIV'S. NEW .WORK.

ry Novel ; or, Varieties in. English Life.- 4 vols.
By Pisistratus Caiton.. • Blackwood.
Reinarkable as, our expectations were ;from its
_very commencement as to the merits of this extra-
ordinary work on its completion, those :expecta-
timiS we must avow have been, in every respect;
realised.
My Novel" is something
regard to its author than another signally,more in
success-
fidachievement in literature. It :must for many
reasons, to our thinking, be regarded as MS master-
piece. Nevertheless, we would have it especially
understood, that, in declaring this, to be our , deli
berate and .
,conscientious conviction, we are not
disposed to treat the predecessors of the neiv fiction
before us with anything.bearing even the seinblance
of. disparagement. We have no inclination what:.
ever to depreciate- the excellence of Sir Bulwer;
Lytton's earlier performances, in _ order that we
may pronounce a more 'studied panegyric upon the
latest fruit of his ever-fructile and ever-ripening
imagination. Among his former productions we •
can enumerate favourites so secure in our affection,
se elevated in our estimation, so fully and Cordially
commanding our admiration, that it would, reqiiire
Some almost preternatural display of originality on
the part of our great novelist to loosen their hold
upon our not superficially exercised capacities of
appreciation. Those wonderful creations of his—
the offspring of his prolific and comprehensive in-
tellect—are, in fact, altogether too diversified in
their nature to clash with each other in their
claires upon our preference : they are too dissimilar
in their character to necessitate at the hands of
the `critic a choice that would assuredly be as idle'
as it might in effect appear 'to be invidious. It is
scarcely so much in reference to the varied aspect
of Sir Bulwer Lytton's reputation in English lite,.
rature :that we offer the tribute of this acknowi
ledgment—although
We might discover wider
field for arguments of a similar tendency
in the fact of -that ample and golden reputa-
tion being derived from eminent labours in
its more -•removed and
almOst..every one of
,more exalted departments,. It is, rather that
we are here writing. in allusion .to the aston-
ishing contrasts visible in the chequered group
,of, his prose fictions alone, to the variegated
dyes (so to speak) colonringginto splendour his gor-
geous robe as a romancist, the charms of an ever-
changing manner, and of an ever-shifting purpose,
which are among the chief spells of his wizard
fascination. Undoubtedly, the fact is marvellous
enough, that, in Bulwer Lytton, we haVe a man who
has adventured into.nearly every one of the higher
regions of imaginative literature—that in all these
regions, without exception, he has mastered the
difficulties in the 'way of ambitious enterprise—
that from all he has brought, sooner or later, some.
brilliant work at once the result of his daring and
the reward of his assiduity. Throughout this ap-
parent changefulness, moreover, he has proved
himself faithful-to-the object of his intellectual
toil, and net less also to the source from which it may
be said• tb have emanated. Art has ever been the jea-
lous mistress he has served, as Nature has been, in all
his purer and loftier efforts, the source of his inspi-
ration. The, one has been, in a manner,. the God-
dess and the other the Priestess of his imagination.
Under such auspices he has been enabled to build
up for himself no common or, we believe, evanes-
cent reputation. Twenty-five years have scarcely.
elapsed since the commencement (in earnest) of his
literary endeavours, since the beginning of his
pilgrimage after the True and the' Beautiful—
and, already he has achieved for himself distinction
as a Poet, as a Dramatist, as an Essayist, as an
Historian, as a Reviewer, as a Novelist, as a Bio-
grapher, as a Publicist, as an Orator, as a Pamph-
leteer i taking part in the lowlier as well as in the .
loftier rivalries ; soaring 'at one period into an epic
atmosphere (the empyrean of Fancy) when chauni-
ing the.gloiltes of King Arthur, and at another di-
recting his plastiC mind to the consideration of the
homelier interests of agriculture in those matter-,
of-fact " Letters to John Bull," signed by
him with such exquisite accuracy and sig-
nificance--" A Landlord and
,a Labourer." Yee,
in very truth, a labourer ! For never, surely-,
did'any one less appear to comprehend tie luxury
of the dolce far niente—the faith of the lotos-
eaters, the wisdom of the lazzaroni. Never re-
laxing in his exertions, or only pausing from them
for a while with a view to their yet more energetic
renewal immediately afterwards, Sir Edward •
Bulwer Lytton has, within this past quarter of a
century, and, while only yet in the maturity of his
manhood, inscribed his name unfailingly in three
divisions, at least, of our national Walhalla.
Neither the wit of . Sydney Smith, nor the subtle
genius of Pascal, could secure a very extended
popularity to the labours of even the most suc-
cessful pamphleteer. As an orator, Sir Bulwer
Lytton has yet to develope those great resources
which upon more than one notable occasion, in
the House of Commons, he has revealed that he
really possesses in his capacity as a rhetorician.
A generous and discriminating critic he has
frequently shown himself to bo through the pages
of the New Monthly, as he has before now
proved himself a vigorous and masterly Reviewer
through his contributions to the Edinburgh. Yet
in-neither capacity has ho gained, because in neither
has he apparently aimed at pre-eminence among his
'contemporaries. Charming though his graceful
memorial of Laman Blanchard, he cannot be said,
even by,lia admirers, to haVe mastered the diffi-
culties encountered in the pathway of the biogra-
pher—and this simply, we take it, by reason of his
never having attempted in that particular school
any elaborated composition. His fragment of a
history of Athens, ornate and eloquent though it
is unquestionably, is still simply a fragment, so
that he may be 'declared to have merely entered his
claim to the dignity of an annalist, without follow-
ing up that claim' by-any adequate justification.
His "Student" must always place him among
the most delightful Of our essayists, even while it
fails to elevate him above the writers of " Elia "
and the " Spectator." Whatever may be thought
of it by cavillers like the ingenious Secretary to
to the Admiralty, the carefully-considered and
closely-reasoned chapters of " England and
the English " will continue to obtain for its
author a high degree of consideration, in
spite of the supreme and. overshadovving renown
of such men as Delohne and Montesquieu.
But, as a poet, as a novelist,, and as a dramatist,
the reputation of Sir Bulwer Lytton may surely
now be regarded as established. In each of those re-
markable characters he has long since vindicated
his right to our admiration ; and he has done this,
let us observe, by a diversity of rare and very ad-
mirable: 'achievements. HiS frequent and vari-,
ens successes have been the consequence, seem-
ingly, of his implicit reliance on the' Oen re
that confidence which was the talisman of good
fortune to Napoleon the Great, and which consti-
tutes in reality the secret of victory as well to
bookmen as to conquerors. It has so operated in.
his instance, that the lurid promise of " Falkland"
has been almost; forgotten ever since the sparkling,
vivacity of " Pelham" first awakened the pub-
lic mind to the birth of. a 'new and creative'
genius among our master-novelists. It has 'so ' deve-
loped its influence in hisregard, that the immature
graces of the " Duchess de la Valliere" have been'
lost sight of now that its worth has been
wholly eclipsed, by the sterling value of plays
like, the brilliant " Money," and the exquisite
" Lady of Lyons," and the impassioned " Riche-
lieu." It -has, in fine, so revealed the fervour of
its. inborn energy as a, source of incitement,- that
the youthful effusions of his muse (the-very titles
of which;we shrink from enumerating, because of
theirnow•Aobvious and 'scarcely.accountable inferi-
ority) have been cast aside by himself as only Merit-
ing Oblivion, dwarfed as they are by contrast with'
his' later and more majestic oompositions—poetry
throbbing with the warm blood of 'his.`, childhood,
and yet: naellowed with the sunny ripeness of the'
judgment of his maturity. Conspicuous though it
is most indisputably in each of the different depart-
inellts
of alreadyour author particularised,
the, ndomitable per-
severance appears to be, perhaps, the ,
most conspicuous in that true faeryland fro t 4 the
purplemista of which he has summoned the IQveli
ness of ./Egle, and the mirth"of Gaviaine, and the,
gentleness of Caradoc, and the wisdom of Merlin,
and the pomp of Carduel, and the pride and the
glory of Pendragon. There • were auguries, nb
doubt, of nobler ackievements for the future in
those pensive verses on " Constance," ending, as
they did, with a gush of natural emotion, and
more clearly still in those touching and' sO-
lemn lines on " Milton," in which 'the Dreamer
rose at times into the rapture of the Cele-
brant, but their promise we cannot but Con-
ceive to have been altogether surpassed by that
satire and that epic which have, within the laSt
few years, been their successors. Questioned for a
long while, Bulwer Lytton's 'capabilities as a poet
have come at last to be recognised ; insoinuch that
he has been enabled, twice, to test the value of
their power under the disguise or shadow of the
anonymous.' Therefore, 'now, at least," he may
exult at the tardy fulfilment, in this respect, Of
what we doubt not had long continued among his-
most cherished aspirations_rejoicing, as Horace
rejoiced; in his tender and alinost plaintive ode to
Melpomene.
Romw principis urbium,
Dignitatur sobolet inter amab,iles •
Vatum ponere me choros ;
Et jam dente minus mordeor invido.
Unlike 'that loitering voluptuary, however, the
bard of "Kind Arthur" has indicated by his public
lif and this not merely in reference to the city of
Lincoln, or the , shire. of Hertford—that he
.; does
not regard the indulgence of poetic reverie as
altogether incompatible with participation in

. .
the ruder struggles 'of the commonwealth.*
Hence? we have found him, at interval 4, taking
part an the - discussions of Parliament ' • and
while in this manner contributing his modicum
.to the records of Hansard, assiduously stAving; as
we have seem, after that distinction which 'he has'
commanded in snail 'extraordinary abundance frein
so many and such opposite departments of Imagina-
tive literature. Marvellous we have alreadY said,'
has been the intellectual plastiCity with *hich he
has7eqUally shOirn himself a proficient now in one,
and now in another of these depa.rtnients : ibut still
more marvellous, to our thinking, has heen. the
variety of manner, or, more, strictly speaking, of
style displayed by him in his one and patamount
,character as a novelist. •
Altogether, Bulwer .Lytton has writte] about
twenty novels, and between no two of themj we may-
safely assert, is there traceable any kind of resem-
blance whatsoever:- Several of them, indeed, are
of a totally distinct species from each ot4r—con-
ceived in a different school-4/-4ton after 4 fashion
wholly dissimilar. Compare, forexainple, Pelham,'
that: Iliad of the-Artificial, in Niouich the hero was,
'according to the happy phrase of his historian,
"'6. personal combination of antitheses," at once a
disciple of Wisdom and a votary. of pleasure, a
moralist and a voluptuary, a fop and a philosopher—
compare it with Zanoni, that' Odyssey of V e Mys- •
tical; 'in which, 'under certain typical fo s were
unravelled 'some of the tangled mazes in the
great , problem of human existence—t hero.
being, se to speak, the incarnation of ealisn/
I
(to' adopt the ingenious explanation p. forth
'u by . some ..nknown writer in the appendix to
the cheap edition just published) enforcing, through
the medium of his fictitious career, the sublime
truth; that '" the universal lot is, after all,lthat of
the highest privilege." What two stories could
possibly present a more startling contrast Ito each
other ?—here the Adventures 'of a Gentleman—
there a Romance of the Rosicrucians ! ' Ccimpare,
again, the delicate and beautiful figment of The
Pilgrims of the Rhine, called by its writer sd grace-
fully and modestly " an episode out of the ;graver
epic of human destinies"-compare it with *lofty
and:majestic narrative of Rienzi, in which fie last
of the -Roman Tribunes, " the hope of Italy," and
the "friend of Petrarch," was so touchingly and
fervidly celebrated. Here, not less, was an asto-
nishing contrast—the memorial of a heroic patriot
sinking under the weight of popular ingratitude,
and the: memento of a young girl slowly dying of
consumption ! Then, there was Paul Clifford,
a story designed to illustrate " a vicious pri-
son-discipline and a sanguinary criminal code,"
and by so doing, to direct attention •in a
particular manner to -
,those enormous flaws in
our penal institutions—and there was Godolphin,
in which the vices of the " intellectual trifler,"
were embodied—and there was the lovely classic
tale- of The Last Days of Pompeii, which was com-
posed when " a stranger froin that remote and
barbarian isle which the imperial Roman shivered
when he named, paused amid the delights of the
soft Campania," and created a soul under the ribs
of the ,dead Heathendom. What attractive diver-
sity of .theme—and Protean changefulness in the
very , style of the different compositions ! 'Con-
tinuing the catalogue of these remarkable works,
there were the meditative history of Ernest. Mal-
travers, and the turbulent and agitated current of
events marking the career of Alice and that story
of The Disowned, in which was adroitly typified
in the person of Algernon Mordaunt, the " Heroism
of Christian Philosophy :" and there were the
melancholy memorials of Eugene Aram, convey-
ingi as their writer intended under the veil of an
alluring Romance, the grim and awful significance
of a Tragedy—and that noble historical narrative
recounting the rise and fall of Warwick, The
Last .of the Barons, from among the real
personages in which . the author could evoke
imaginary men, and things like poor Adam
Warner and his Eureka—and Devereux, wherein
the people and manners of 'the last century were
depicted through the aid of a fictitious autobio-
graphy,—and Harold, a poem in prose, relating the
downfall of the last of the Saxon sovereigns-,--and
Leila; depicting the fate of Grenada and of Boabdil,
the last of the Abenceriages—and Night and
Morning, a tale purely English and domestic; one
of the best among the best, a favourite among our
favonrites—and Lucretia, the wierd annals of crime
and infaniy—and the Cantons, abounding thrdugh,
out with a most tender pathos and a most sweet.
philosophy. After all these amazingly variedpro-
ductions comes the latest of Btilwer Lytton's lite-
rarY achievements—and anachievement it assuredly
is in the strictest sense of the word—this fiction,
which he has himself distinguished above its prede-
cessors by designating it MY NovnL, par excellence.
If we were required to attempt a careful analysis
of the plot, or a minute exposition of the incidents
described in the course of its development, we must
fairly acknowledge at once that we should . feel
ourselves to be in a position of no inconsiderable em-
barrassment. Honestly, we would about as. lief un-
dertake to define minutely the contents of the 'En-
Cyclopcedia Britannica. We would as soon be con,
ducted into the great hall (when completed) of that
wonder of wonders, now being erected at Saltaire,
and after viewing all that complicated whirl of
Wheels, and pulleys, and pistons, and mules, and
throstles, and devils, and scutchers, making up the
din and madness of its machinery, be asked—cqolly
—to describe that. Fancy, for an instant, ; the
, task of 'thridding the labyrinth of all its intricate
and interwoven involutions ! And then discover.
' the cui bone ! Besides, supposing the' explanation
to be actually accomplished, we have a; rather
. shrewd suspicion that it would be something tanta-
mount in lucidity to Johnson's definition of net
work L-." reticulations or decussations with inter-
stices between the intersections"—the elucidation
being, in fact, more difficult of comprehension
than the thing elucidated. No : the work
itself .is here tempting all men to read it
for themselves and not to search after a
scanty inkling of 'the drift of the story,, by
obtaining iit second-hand from the dry epitome of
a reviewer. Adventuring upon any such epitome
appears !to ourselves at least, in reference to a
really 'remarkable work like' " My Novel;" about
as rational a proceeding as it' might be on ,ex-
&Mining some masterpiece from; the looms of the
Gobelins,, (or, as the Cockney called it, the Tapeatry
of 'the'Goblins,) instead of pausing before it! to
admire the delicacy, and adroitness, and elabera-
tien apparent in every portion of it as a miracle of
art, to go prying curiously at the back of it, ,in-
.quisitive after every thread and tag knotted there
in, the process of fabrication . eager to see where
the damson-colour commenced and the apple-green
ended, or where the peach-blossom ended and the
ruby-red commenced. ,Taxidermy is a .very pretty
science no, doubt, and some'lions may not lose their.
tali* gloss during 'the course of; .the preparation.
:Entoniology again is, without question; a study
eranieritly ':wertily of every reasonable encourage-
ment 'though in the handling of them some of the
,bloain is apt at times to be rubbed off the wings
of your rarer prizes, your, dragon-moths and your
tiger-butterflies. Let no disparagement be under-
stood as implied by. the comparison. Rather.
otherwise., There is a bloom on a thought or on a
sentiment. no less than on the wings of a butterfly..
We. confess to having no sympathy whatever with
those who- woul d for ever be reducing the beautiful
to the matter-of-fact—any more than we should ,
derivenpleasure from seeing every clown that passed
through, our, garden fingering the petals of our
choiceat aneraonies and picotees. Briefly, we can-
not understand the advantage, much less the sat .s-
-faction of reducing the
,plot of some masterly
Work of imagination to a dry syllabus or abridg-
Ment. Scarcely less idle we conceive it to be,
seeking as some solvers of such riddles perpetually
are,. for the hidden meaning of every fanciful
cOmposition. Sir Bulwer' Lytton has himself
expressed this , 'elsewere (" Pilgrims of the
'Rhine," ch. xviii.), where he complains that some
critics in !their over-subtlety have' turned Hamlet
into an - allegory, 'not even allowing Shakspere
to paint mankind, but insisting On his embodying
qualities. " i They turn, poetry, into metaphysics;' -
says:tiO; !s‘ and .6-04 seems to them shallow, unless
an allegory; • which is false,
,can be seen at the
bottom: ' The remark, in the' original, is applied
to' the G-erman, but it is unhappily no less appli-
cable to a certain portion of -our own literature.,
Against the danger of this oyer-subtlety, as against
that' of the reduction of his plot to a bald epitome,
our author is fortunately, guarded in his present
work by the circumstance of its magnitude—and.
'not merely by the circumstance of its magnitude,
but by that also of its infinite elaboration.
' ' The diversity of the characters introduced to the
readers of "My Novel;" is only equalled as a dis—
nngcideeinemts
aesfsotchieatii
in one' common interest through all the mazes of
ipi dis-
play
king
ioi of t
ii
inovseenctiiloanr a
obtyo
rst h
te
ovgaertiheetry,
the cheqUeted narrative, and weaving the Unbroken
thread of the story through a countless number or
tions. Everywhere throughout the fiction there is
Complicated, and yet distinctly traceable, , involu-
diScernible; on a careful scrutiny, the application
of the subtlest art to the grateful toil of its de-
velOpthent. Only, however, upon • a careful
scrutiny, for otherwise the . art • remains in-
visible under the garb of a facile and all-:
embracing ease, an ease. imparting to the language

II The opinion expressed by Horace runs thus—it occurs
at the very opening of this delicious ode :
" Quem to Melpomene, semel
„ Nascentem placido lumine videris,
Ilium non labor Isthmius,
, Clarabit pugilem, &c.
Sed quce Tibur ?Rue fertile prfcfluunt,
• Et spissce nentorum come,
Fingent Aeolio carmine nobilem.

--Carmaib. iv. ii.

the charm of, a spontaneous eloquence, and infus-
ing. into the whole work the spell of a most sweet
and natural fascination. 'Never before, indeed,
has Sir Bulwer Lytton manifested More delightfully
the highest skill of all—the cirq celaVe artem—that
skill which is; in truth, the offipring of his more
elevated aspirations, as it is the reward of his pro-
longed and indoinitable perseverance.
Riccabocca we would at Once Select from .aniong"
the crowd of imagmary,Lbeings depicted My
Novel " as our especial favourite. .Nuinerous other
favourites we hAve, of course, amidst all that motley
concourse of his 444Mpanions. We have an affec-'
Lion for the bluff old Squire of the parish of Hazel-
dean—an affection.none' the less Sincere because of
our malicious pleasure in the remembrance that
hisAiether man was only clad in nankeen when he
tumbled among the thistles, and none the less ear-
pest because of our contempt for the stocks and our
admiration for the sermon on the text from Gala-
tians. We have an affection, too, for the pure,min
and gentle-hearted Parson of that same parish of
Hazledeau—in spite of-' his irritability over the
fluctuations of a rubber, and this, even though WE
cannot refrain from chuckling:nt the recollection
of his discomposure on that horrible, high-trottins
horse, when hailed from the postchaise window by
Richard Avenel's inquiry of—" How's the leather ?'
We have a kindness even for that same Dick Ave-
nel-4he true type of your go-ahead manufacturer;
fr-mh-frcim the inspiriting influences of the political
atinoSPhere of Yankeeland—liking liim not a jot
the less because we
„happen to be amused when he
is so- " catawanipously thawed up" (to employ one
of his own. characteristic expressions) on venturing
to aspire to the attainment of a baronetcy through
the interest of Audley Egerton. For Audley
Egerton himself, we cherish, through all those
clouds of suspicion, sentiments only of the tender-
est sympathy and' the fullest admiration. For it is
impossible not to recognise in his instance, under
the conventional frigidity of publklife, the warmth
of the human affections. Harley L'Estrange—let
us acknowledge it, at once—we should have loved'
incomparably the most of all, but that we conceive
that most exquisite creation to have been strangely
marred towards the close of the narrative. Na-
tural though the change depicted by, our author in
the whole character by Lord L'_Estrange--wakened
to revenge as he is only by the 'discovery of what
he imagines at the first to be an act of unexampled
turpitude—it must, nevertheless, be admitted, to
our thinking, that, if in this Sir Bulwer Lytton:
has evidenced his superior allegiance to the, True,
he has in the very act of so doing—sacrificed the
Beautiful. Until this sudden and startling trans-
formation in Harley's nature we should have
laughed to scorn the judgment of any reader who
could for a single instant have hesitated in accord-
ing to him a decided preference among all 'the
characters: Since that change, however, our par-
tiality in his regard has been, as it were against
our own inalination, utterly dissipated. Every-
thing he does, even when restored to his former
suavity, fails to revive in its early freshness
our genial estimate of his temperament. There
is a flaw in what was previously the " one
entire and perfect chrysolite" of his really love-
able idiocyncrasy. And so—Harley L'Estrange
brought down from his pedestalwe turn with un-
divided, admiration to the disguised Duke of Ser-
rano, the good Alphonso, the gentle; the wise, the
guileless even where he fancies himself most full of
guile, the homely and yet stately, the chivalrous
and yet fantastic, the magnanimous and kindly lord
of the little Casino, feeding upon sticklebacks, and
ever thumbing the pages of that dreadful Machia-
velli—Dr. Riccabocca. Even Melancthon must
have loved him in spite of his being one of those
incorrigible " Papishes" even Melancthon, we
say, because was it not his mild voice that was
raised in applause when Servetus was slowly roasted
to death by Calvin ? Yes, forbidden.by the records
of the fourth volume to' sustain our preference for
Lord L'Estrange, we select Dr. Riccobocca- from
among all the more attractive characters in
"My Novel," as our favourite of favourites.
And this, notwithstanding that we have amongst
those favourites not already mentioned several
whom we cannot regard otherwise than with very
peculiar tenderness. There is John Burley the
wasted genius—a companion picture to David
Fallen, companion we mean as affording a touching
contrast to that exquisite delineation—poor John
Burley illustrating his baulked ambition by that .
one-eyed perch which he declared to be the Delilah
of his existence ; squandering the resources of his
rare intellect upon that- detestable Beehive which
was only another name for Oblivion ; and in the
downward anguish of his despair seeking to degrade
to the gaudy squalor of a gin-palace the dieties of
whom Schiller had sung so divinely in his glorious
Dithyramb ! There is Leonard Fairfield, the
young poet, or rather the lovely ideal of a young
poet—all the freshness of youth and all the
passion of poetry, constituting the charm of
his individuality—winning his way to our heart
first by his refusal of the sixpence, and first imbib-
ing the bitter wisdom of experience from the terrible
life and death of Chatterton. We are not without
a partiality, moreover, for Dr. Morgan, the good-
natured homoeopathist ; for Frank Hazeldoan, the
young Guardsman, who is as generous a ne'er-do-
weel as lie is undoubtedly a thoughtless scapegrace ;
for the faithful Jackymo,' ever looking after the
small fry in the fish-pond, when he is not tending
his garden, or invoking the aid of his sainted name-
sake. Besides those already mentioned, what
crowds there are of other and very, different cha-
racters ! A glimpse of the broken-hearted soldier,
Digby. An outline sketch (but such an outline
sketch!), as sUggestive and all-sufficient as oue of those
from the pencil of Moritz-Retzsch--of the dyspeptic
poor relation, Higginbotham with " expectations!"
A callotype of old John Avenel, the imbecile wreck of
a small, retired, provincial tradesman. A kind of si-
houette, in profile of the haughty Colonel Pompley,
an officer having a supreme horror of Vulgarians.
Beyond all these, in addition to a multitude of
other personages, ranging through all the ranks of
society in England, as the second title of the story
naturally leads the reader to anticipate, besides a
concourse extending upwards in the social scale

from Stirn, the hard-lieaded Steward of Squire
Hazeldean, to the Earl of Lansmere, the father of
Harley, Lord L'Estrange—there are minor figures
grouped elsewhere on this broad canvas duly su-
bordinated, of course, to those which are placed in
the foreground more conspicuously.. Prominent,
howbeit, among the less prominent, are Mark
Fairfield, the poet carpenter—Mr. Norreys, the
London Man of Letters—Mr. Prickett, the book-
seller—Spendquick, the man about town—Borrow-
well, unquestionably his half-brother-7-Mr. Sprott,
the tinker, the gentleman who enters into that
very admirable arrangement with his beast of bur-
den (vol. i. p. 26)—" The Tinker went behind
and sung, the Donkey went before and was
thwacked." Maunder Slugge Leslie, Esquire, of
Rood-hall, the decayed landed proprietor—Oliver,
his youngest son, not too proud to play at cricket
with the children of the villagers--hosest Farmer
Bruce of Hawleigh—even the nameless Austrian
Prince, and the equally nameless Bonifice of the
Lansmere Arnis, the latter being the dogmatical
iisputator who poses Parson Dale 'when piqued
upon the inaccuracy of his knowledge its a philolo-
gist, by sententiously observing, in regard to tlic
difference between bumptious and gumptious (vol.
i. p. 320), " Bumptious is bumptious, and gump-
tious is guinptious. • Now, the town beadle is
bumptious, and Mrs. Avenel is gumptious." All
these are delineated with a bold_ and apparently
careless facility ; but yet, at the same. time, it may
be remarked, in every instance with singular
niceness of discrimination. Perhapi still more
ad.mirably, contrasted with each other are the three
principal, villains of the narrative—the brilliant;
hardy, and relentless . Giulio Franzini, Count di
Peschiera-----the sleek; Jew money-lender, Baron
Levy, who first appears upon the scene (Vol. ii.,
p., 137) as " a handsome'inan with a came)ia in bis
button-hole.;"—and wiliest of all the schemers in
"My . Novel," Randal Leslie, the protege of
Audley Egerton, as crafty as lago and meaner than
lachimo, one who evidently coincided ' with the
Duke do Lauzun (" Duchess de la Valliere," Act
i., :sc. iv.)-in.believing that
"The best hero is- the cleverest rogue." 1
Randal may be regarded, we conjecture, as placed
in 'the , balance against Leonard, 'just ,as Levy the
usurer has the direct 'counterpoise of interest to
Egerton the statesman, or as Peschiera may be
viewed in the light of a foil or antithesis to Ricca
bocca the true hero of the book being Harley-
a passage
Lord L'Estrange. Randars position as the bad
tl
geniug of the story is happily indicated in
describing him gliding after nightfall through the
darkened streets of the metropolis, When (Vol. iii.,
and on.
p. 282) " solitary amidst the vast city,
went the still
through the machinery of civilisationTi
.iroughout the Spirit of of Intellectual Evil."
always with .1, , •
gress of the tale, it is
that we find ourselves carried
a.mination of the intrigues of Il , s,use of relief
eslaiewtOYafreOlnutePiunnpelt:
tion of the subtle but harmless
unsuspicious and benignantt Rie'escas thocilcoas.ophwyeosaf
utinle.
ter on among all thoser e villanous c,asuistries and
cold-blooded proverbsali
tion, with 'making up the staple
conversation, with _ ever-hesitating?f. the
;gentle glitle nature of belieft in
,s 4.
Machiavelli. that 3ilost uncontaminated eurde of all
the disciples find
ourselves
shelter were in the
ptahneyfilowiesr-abseids
of
some greenb
and among
hisaul:a ocigm.t. Wh_fenweev
and sunny " Pleasaunce."
association, to impart a of
even the most grotesque portions oies
ircit Costume being: in bizf3iriris° colstume—
of habitual
sorts nature dsemisty, toy
Inisqtterade. In this niafacirt'li sePve:n
brella becomes glorified— 1
Chinese Emperor. His book his red: um-
the symbol of a
...carried under his