The Sun. — 1846-02-12 (London, England)

GAME TALES. I 01. 111. 1311  Harriet Plartincau.  As an acute and sound reasoner upon political economy, Miss Martineau has long been familiarly ! known to English readers. Her powers of argument are fully appreciated. her cases in point are generally admissible, her manner of ' regardirg any moot. d question of jurisprudence i.e always sufficie-•tly new to render it attractive. Indeed, her popularity is ascribable more to clearness of perception and appo• siteness of d, velopment upon any abstruse principle than to displays of rhetoric, .or those many superfluous adjuncts which tend rather to decorate than actually to improve a volume. Ingenuity or dexterity as a logician are qualities to which Mss Martineau cannot advance the veriest ghost of a claim ; she is wholly and entirely deficient in the trickeries so prevalent among political theorists. The does not skin a social wound over with the gloss of language ; she probes it, with a firm and unshrinking baud, to the very bottom ; ,she • xtracts cash of its poisonous or virulent qualities, bit by bit, classifies them, one after another, with scrupulous exactness, and then holds them up in succession for public scrutiny in s.) many chap-ers. Where the remedy is questionable, she specifies one herself; and maintains it by a I..ng array of wherefore:; where, however, the course to be adopted is self-evident, she abandons it to its own silent but moving eloquence. In the series which have particu'arly originated these considerations in our own mind, and of which the volume before us forms the conclusion, Miss Martineau has exercised her abilities in a more alluring, if not a more sound or sober manner. The object of the entire work is pretty tolerably plain from the title alone ; and so vigorous is the handling of the theme, so unanswerable are the abuses ther,in pourtrayed, and to utterly incapable of much longer support, is the system stigmatised, that we are fain to regard these " Forest Tales" as harbingers of death to the game-laws, and as the precursors of a more rational state of things. In this light the last effusion of the " set" must be regarded as the a' to penultimate of the abrogation. From the two adjectives which fists the heading of this story—" Gentle and Simple"—we may learn its most pervading- characteristic. Gentle and simple enough the tale is—it is Ore, unadulterated, limpid- English. Nor is -it merely thus in its style of comp sition; it is English also in its general tone; it is English—thoroughly English—in all its characters The authoress has sea- cted her materials from the fountain. head ; she has transferred to her pages the emotions which are even welling up in our agricultural districts. She has with a right 'a.thfui pencil copied tiie features which are visible in our umntrymen. Whether in the mea• dow, in the cottage, in the stubble-fiAii, in the high-road, or among.the crops. All the characters, however lightly sketched, will be recognised ; they a. e not so much individuals as representatives of a genus. Their prototypes are scattered tar and wide through every country, without number. On,-low, • the honest, steady going, plainspoken farmer; Lisathess the conscientious gamekeeper; Granny Stott, the industrious, peevish, and respectable housewife; Groves, the hearty old fellow who is licensed to sell game, and who advised his " poaching party to s!sik their f ,was in the face of the policeman they meet in his rounds of an autumnal morning, or asked him to judge of th,- weight of a hare yet warm on the coldest vvinter night;" all the pas sengere, and many others not specifi.-d, are no more the creations of fltncy than daguerrotypes are; down even to little Tot hersels.  One blemish in the hook, which is however a neces sary consequence of the subject and the aim proposed, is its accumulation of dry and heavy dialogue. Every scene, every situation, is used simply as a peg upon which to hang a number of fresh arguments ; yet from this very circumstance the object is never lost sight of for an instant. The pernicious game laws !—there it stands ever before the reader, from the opening sentence to the concluding syllable—the pernicious gam,-laws ! Luke Voila, a common day-labourer, as one may say, a hedger and ditcher, is the hero; and in tracing his moral destruction, from his ignorance in picking up a nest of partridge's eggs from a bank on his way home from work, to his transportation for catching a couple of leverets, the mistaken pdicy of the present legislation about game is admirably defined; it is a vast political question condenses, as it were, into an anecdote ; it is a companion to the Iliad in a nutsh,ll. Any one who is interested in the welfare of his fellow creatures, and V his fellow-countrymen, will real " Gentle and Simple ;" it is an important exposition of sin important topic ; nor is it devoid of the merits necessary for a work of fiction. In this respect the suicide of Lisainer. and the return of Luke to his cottage-home after confinement in jail, are passages fraught with a s•range end touching pathos. Altogether this is a clever and good-spirited tale, germinated not only in the mind but in the heart also of its nu t horess.