The Sun.
London, England, 1845-01-01 00:00:00

BENTLEY'S MISCELLANY.

Mr. Albert Smith here commences a new work o
fiction, with the ominous title of the " Marchioness of
Brinvilliers." The subject will require a great deal
of dextrous and delicate management to render it
palatable to the reader, for the Marchioness, together
with her paramour, St. Croix—the two most noto-
rious poisoners of the day—wets a heroine in whose
fortunes it is scarcely possible for any one to take the
slightest interest. The story opens in a promising
manner, but we must see more of it before we ran
venture to pronounce a decided opinion. The " Close
of the Old Year" is a poem, whose greatest recom-
mendation is that it does not fall Belo* absolute
mediocrity. The " rke of Peterhoff" is an ani-
mated description, by Mrs. Romer, of one of the
Emperor Nicholas's birthday festivals. 'We could
have spared, however, the , fair writer's eyagge-
rated iietount of the " unrivalled beauty" of the
Czar. The " Boys of Kilkenny "is a lively,
boisterous sketch of certain national oddities,
by a writer who sins himself " An Irish Whiskey-
drinker." The "Uaol Chaplain continues his per-
sonal recollections this month, and his stories—whose
only fault is that they are of somewhat too gloomy a
character—exhibit no falling oft in point of interest.
" Confessions of De Londe ChiPelhain" is a lively tale
froth the phittised the author of " Richard
Savage." In the " Literary Retrospect of the De-
parted Great " occur the following reminiscences of
the late Charles Mills—one of the profoundest his-
torians d the day, and who—had he lived—would
have realised the predictions of Scott and Southey,
and taken a foremost rank among the authors of his
age. We knew him long and intimately; and as we
lift our eyes up from the desk at which we write this
to his bust, wnich faces us, it seems but yesterday
since we heard him, in his usual buoyant manner,
relate the progress he had made in his last and most
popillat work on "ChiValrv!" whieb reaebed its third
edition but a few days befOre his death, by consump- '
tion, at Southampton. The writer is mistaken in
some of his renPectirig Charles Mills, who did
hot winter at Pisa, but at Nice, and who was not
"thirty-six years old " when he died, but thirty-nine :"
"Coeval with my. acquaintance with hint, and be-
tWeett the period of boyhood. and of college, was my
more matured friendship With Charles Mills, Charles
Mills ! I think I hear those of my grandchildren who
mat, tit some future time, pick up this retrospect,
attiohg old bills, or old letters, ask, Who was Charles
Mills ? ' I answer, 'Many a worse man, many a
writer with one third of his knowledge, has lived, and
does live, whilst he is chiefly to be found in a dusty
back-room (that is, his remains), at Messrs. Longmans',
Paternoster-row.'
" He was one of that race, my child, or children, who
may scan what this hand now writes (having done,
thank Heaven ! for the present with these papers from
Lincoln's Inn)—of a race quite gone by—clean expunged
from society—a laborious gentleman writer. A man of
independent circumstances, not rich, who chose, from
the love of letters, and the desire of fame, to dedicate
himself to the fabrication of long historical works, the
very subjects of which would drive our present authors
to despair. History of Mohammedanism—History of
the Crusades, History of Chivalry—admirable, neglected
works, written in a too ambitious styli, with the ghost
of Gibbon always in the writer's view, presiding over his
library table, but excellent, nevertheless—and, my
daughters, or grand-daughters, or great grand-daugh-
ters, they were pure ! The subjects were delicately
handled ; for their writer had an infinite sense of what
was seemly, and was a Christian writer. - -
"He was, indeed, a sort of knight-errant in his no-