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

GAME TALES.: T 01. 111. By Harriet Martineau. 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 regarding any mooted question of jurisprudence is always sufficiently new to render it attractive. Indeed, her popularity is ascribable more to clearness of perception and appositeness of development 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 Miss Martineau car not advance the veriest ghost of a claim ; she is wholly and entirely deficient in the trickeries so prevalent among political theorists. She does not skin a social wound over with the gloss of language ; she probes it, with a firm and unshrinking hand, to the very bottom ; she extracts each of its poisonous or virulent qualities, bit by bit, classifies them, one after another, with scrupulods exactness, and then holds thew up in succession for public scrutiny in so many chapters. Where the remedy is questionable, she specifies one herself, and maintains it by a long array of wherefores; 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 particularly 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 thrrain pourtrayed, and so 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 ante penultimate of the abrogation. From the two adjectives which form the heading of this story—" Gentle and Simple"—we may learn its most pervading characteristic. Gentle and simple enough the tale is—it is pure, unadulterated, limpid English. Nor is it merely thus in its style of composition; it is English also in its general tone; it is English—thoroughly English—in all its characters. The authoress has selected her materials from the fountainhead ; she has transferred to her pages the emotions which are ever welling up in our agricultural districts. She has with a right faithful pencil copied the features which are visible in our countrymen, whether in the meadow, in the cottage, in the stubble-field, in the high-road, or among the crops. All the characters, however lightly sketched, will be recognised ; they are not so much individuals as representatives of a genes. Their prototypes are scattered far and wide through every county, without number. Onslow, the honest, steady-going, plain-spoken farmer; Lisamer, the conscientious gamekeeper; Granny Stott, the industrious, peevish, and respectable housewife; Groves, the hearty old fellow • who is licensed to sell gdme, and vkho advised his " poaching party to shake their fowls in the face of the policeman they met in his rounds of an autumnal morning, or asked him to judge of the weight of a hare yet warn on the coldest winter night;" all these personages, and many others not specified, are no more the creations of fancy than daguerrotypes are; down even to little Tot herself.  One blemish in the book, 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 bang 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 game-laws ! Luke Voile, 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 neat of partridge's eggs from a bank on his way home from work, to his transportation for catching a couple of leverets, the mistaken policy of the present legislation about game is admirably defined; it is a vast political question condensed, as it were, into an anecdote ; it is a companion to the Iliad in a nutshell. Any one who is interested in the welfare of his fellow• creatures, and of his fellow-countrymen, will read " Gentle and Simple ;" it is an important exposition of an important topic ; nor is it devoid of the merits necessary for a work of fiction. In this respect the suicide of Lisamer, and the return of Luke to bis cottage-home after confinement in jail, are passages fraught with a strange and touching pathos. Altogether this is a clever and good-spirited tale, germinated not only in the mind but in the heart also of its authoress.