From the New Monthly Magazine. MRS. GORE. Mrs. WHAT constitutes a first-rate novel is a If you can create yourselves into any of these problem which might raise consternation in great creators, why have you not?" the senate-house of Cambridge; a problem Gore, one of the cleverest of her sex, holds knotty enough to stagger the entire corpora- to the same creed, and explicitly states her tion of wranglers, and strike the senior ops conviction, that a woman of first-rate facul"all of a heap," and impel the junior ops ties would constitute only a third-rate man; (wooden spoon and all) to take refuge in citing the names of Mrs. Somerville, Miss suicide. When a plenary and all-satisfying Edgeworth, Miss Martineau, and Mrs. Browndefinition has once been given, it will be ing, as confirming her rule-" such rare extime to append to the main proposition the ceptions that I can find (so she writes in accompanying "rider;" viz., whether the ac- 1848) no fifth to add to the catalogue." Necomplishment of a first-rate novel is within vertheless, if that is a first-rate novel of its the potential limits of female genius-whe- kind, which holds a polished mirror up to ther it lies within or beyond the frontiers as- London high life, and secures glittering and signed to womanly capacity by psychologi- vivacious reflections of its giddy, madding cal map-makers. If the ideal novel be as crowds, and whiles away idle or heavy hours difficult of realization as a first-class poem or by witty sketches of men and manners, and play, we fear, both on a priori and a posteriori shoots Folly as it flies with shafts of singular grounds, that the verdict will go against point, Mrs. Gore will take honors in the first "the sex." Most of their wisest brethren, class, with such others as Lister and Disraeli, and some of their wisest selves-(we trem- Hook and Bulwer Lytton. We are far from ble, currente calamo, as we remember the ex- calling the fashionable novel a first-rate thing; istence of Mrs. Bloomer and the Emancipa- the world, or a "pretty considerable" fractionists!)-emphatically support this view of tion of it, is very properly, and none too soon, the case. If the view be fallacious, it can growing weary of that department of fiction. and ought to be disproved by facts. And But taking it such as it is, we see in it a field, so it is indignantly exclaims some belle the cultivation of which has been attained by Amazon-facts are against it. To which female heart, in a degree almost, if not quite, some uncourteous infidel, having examined equal to that realized by the masculine genthe evidence, will probably reply: Tant pis der. In fact, it is because the fashionable pour les faits. And then the malignant scof-novel is a comparatively trivial matter, refer, shaking his perennial wig, will order quiring powers of an order quite inferior to judgment to go by default. Woman, sis- those essential to a higher range of art-it is ter!"-thus have we seen the better half of because it is so much more easy to sparkle the genus homo apostrophized by one of its on the surface than to stem and direct the most chivalric admirers-" Woman, sister! | under-current-that a woman can write a there are some things which you do not ex- Cecil" which shall rival a man's "Pelham,' ecute as well as your brother man; no, nor while she does not prove her ability to cope ever will. Pardon me, if I doubt whether with the same man's "Rienzi." Both intelyou will ever produce a great poet from lectually and morally, the fashionable novel your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a occupies but humble rank. Of novels in Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a general, the best which can be hoped is, acgreat scholar-by which last is meant, not cording to Sir Walter Scott, that they may one who depends simply on an infinite sometimes instruct the youthful mind by real memory, but also on an infinite and electri- pictures of life, and sometimes awaken their cal power of combination, bringing together better feeling and sympathies by strains of from the four winds, like the angels of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. *Preface to Mrs. Armytage. generous sentiment and tales of fictitious woe. Beyond this point-and we fear all fashionable novels must be so classed-they are, adds the greatest of novelists, "a mere elegance, a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half-love of literature which pervades al ranks in an advanced stage of society, and are read much more for amusement than for the least hope of deriving instruction from them." Meanwhile we may safely aver of Mrs. Gore's expositions of frivolous high life, that it is almost impossible de donner à des sottises une tournure plus agréable. Whatever we may think of her many-sided satire and her one-sided whiggism, there is no denying her facile mastery of the materials with which she works. Each change of fashion's many-colored life she knows and draws con amore-each aspect in the biography of its votaries, whether are inventing political combinations and speculating upon European alliances, employ themselves in caballing with Madame Le Brun, the Talleyrand of modern modistes, concerning revolutions in caps and conspiracies against turbans that be. Or, showy intrigantes in white satin, those prime donne of society, who, whatever ministers shall reign, are always to be found in musk-scented correspondence with Downing-street. Or, drawing-room parasites, with the true toady capacity for the running-pattern conversation that forms so admirable an arpeggio accompaniment to the solos. Or, ladies in their ninth lustrum, who have renounced forever the influence of the puppies, and betaken themselves for consolation to the tabbies, and are inspired with a new insight into the purposes of existence by cards-"universal panacea-cards that knit up the ravelled sleeve of care, boon Nature's kind restorer, balmy cards." Peers and parvenus, clubs and coteries, dowagers and chaperones, tufthunters and toadies; dandies who write taffeta verses in silken albums, and wash their poodles in milk of roses; dandies couchant— Time hath reduced them to wrinkles and prayers, dies rampant-vehement, garrulous, and supercilious, silent, self-concentrated; danAnd the flirt finds a decent retreat in the Saint.*geously impertinent; ineffable coxcombery in all its kaleidoscopic aspects, from that of the down to that of Swan and Edgar's; these, omnibus box (scil., opera, not " city, bank") and such as these, are Mrs. Gore's plastic creatures, her slaves of the lamp. She is expert in the lingo which they use, or affect. Mr. George Borrow is not a greater adept in gypsy slang, nor Judge Haliburton in the racy etymology of Brother Jonathan, nor Lever in rollicking Hibernicisms, nor Marryat Dickens in the idioms of Cockneyism, nor in the hand-book of Snobbism, nor Kingsley in marine stores of eloquence, nor Thackeray in Christianized Carlylese, nor Anstey in the platitudes of debate, nor Hume in the "tottle" of the whole-than is Mrs. Gore in the patavinity of peers and the patois of parve In the full blaze of bonnets, and ribands, and airs-Such things as no rainbow hath colors to paint, or at a subsequent epoch, when The true fashionable novelist has been described as enjoying the serenity of a fly upon a new-made grave, or an or-molu Venus above a French clock, smiling unmoved at her own gilded toe, heedless of the whirring wheels and straining springs, and the everfleeting course of time below. We do not altogether confound Mrs. Gore with that school. She satirizes, as well as depicts, the gay world. She shows it, and something more-she shows it up. She does not require us, as the true fashionable novelist does, to fall down and worship her image; nay, she bids us rap our knuckles on its brow, and mark the echo of sounding brass; or lay our hand on its side, and observe the ab sence of all pulsation, of all life. So keenly, indeed, does she see into and despise the weak points of the idol, that satire has become almost too habitual with her, and finds a quarry at every turn. It looks ungrateful in Diana's silver shrine-makers to deride the goddess, seeing that ἐκ ταυτης της εργασίας ἡ ἐνπορια άντων εστι. Denizens of fashionable and nus. gor When she draws a character that we can like or respect, the interest we take in it is greater than such a character would elsewhere command, from the relief it affords to the tinkling cymbalry and crackling thorns and gilded gew gaws around. Being the only pseudo-bird (to use her own illustration) which very human thing present, it is hailed as a alights upon the mast during a sea-voyage, and which the mariner notes with intense in fashionable life there are, whom none can sketch with happier vraisemblance. Such as ministers' wives, who, while their *Thomas Moore. husbands terest, however dingy its plumage or poor its voice. It is a mercy to meet with such a To give a catalogue raisonné of her writings on bon ton in all its branches, is more than we undertake. It would involve a larger ex now afford; for we cannot, like her, write against time, upon ream after ream of foolscap. To enumerate her "entire works" would be a task proper for arithmetical recreationists. We will not attempt it, until we have gone through Baxter's three hundred and sixty-six quartos (that is, some allege, one for every day in the year, plus an extra one for leap year), on the integral series of books registered at last Leipzig fair. rara avis, making no pretensions to merciless | Bids every hour the monstrous fashions veer, wit, and unambitious of a repute for persiflage. And guides the toss, the simper, and the leer.* Not that Mrs. Gore's wit, with all its levity, is devoid of wisdom. Wit she somewhere But when we do parley with the species, it defines the animus of wisdom-legitimate off- is as well to do so with a sprightly satisist as spring of an union between good sense and dragoman. And Mrs. Gore's style of intergood spirits. But there is a weariness to the pretation is so piquant and amusing, that these flesh in over-much commerce with the exerstrangers and foreigners" become very cise and the victims of raillery; satire, how- passable for a time. ever polished, becomes an edged tool with which we care not long to play nor to see it glancing, and doing execution in the grasp of others. Three volumes of sprightly sar-penditure of time and paper than we can just casm leave one in poor spirits-or perhaps a little angry at having spent so much time on hollow hearts that do not improve on acquain tance. The author is then in danger of being characterized in Grammont's words-elle ennuie en voulant briller. Jeffrey says that such a brilliant circle as that of Madame du Deffand probably will never exist again in the world, and adds, " nor are we very sorry for it." The company in which Mrs. Gore is most chez lui, is in kind, not degree, akin to that which graced the suppers at the convent of St. Joseph; not so witty, it is almost equally heartless, and impresses us with uncomfortable, and perhaps sometimes unjust, conceptions of human nature in its patrician phaises. By her own showing, Madame du Deffand could never lose anything. Take them en masse, and Mrs. Gore's characters-those who have anything characteristic about them -seem to labor under the same impotency. The Parisian réunions must have been highly delightful to those who, as Jeffrey says, sought only for amusement; "but not only does amusement not constitute happiness, but also it cannot afford much pleasure to those who have not other sources of happiness." And thus even the amusement derivable from the society of" Mothers and Daughters," and the "Hamiltons," and their various concentric circles, soon palls on our taste, and the smile is exchanged for a sigh. There is much good in the world of fashion, according to the historian of "Bleak House," and there are many good and true people in it. "But the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of Little profit is there, and not much pleasure, in assignations with that drawing room divinity, affectation; air. who rules the vain, capricious throng, Twines the soft limb, and tunes the lisping tongue, VOL. XXVII. NO. IV. Whoso admires "Pelham; or, the Adventures of a Gentleman," will own to a like sympathy with "Cecil; or, the Adventures of a Coxcomb." A coxcomb of the first magnitude is the Hon. Cecil Dauby. And notwithstanding the effeminate tendency inherent in the very constitution of coxcombry, there is reason to marvel how a female hand could have moulded so shrewd, dashing, and exquisite a petit maitre. Byron complained of the specimens extant in his days. We have no accomplished blackguards like Tom Cecil is one who flourished in Byron's days, the slave of the beau monde. He becomes dictator to the world of fashion-a coxcomb of genius-a sovereign who, when he meets Brummel at Calais, regards that dethroned *The Reigning Vice. Book V. 34 exile much as Cromwell surveys the features of the decapitated king, in Delaroche's icture of Charles I., in his coffin. Cecil became a coxcomb for life by catching a glimpse of himself, at six months old, in the swing-glass of his mother's dressing-room; to infant instinct there was something irresistible in its splendid satin cockade; and from that apocalyptic hour it was discovered that Master Cecil "was always screaming, unless, danced up and down by the head nurse within view of the reflection of his one fascinating little person." The rise and progress of his dandyism are detailed with edifying minuteness. What the moral of such a chronicle may be, it were hard to say; unless, as has been suggested in the case of Pelham, to show that under the corsets of a dandy there sometimes beats a heart. Cecil, indeed, is eager to aver that there is no more sentiment in his composition than in a jar of Jamaica pickles; but he knows better. He would be simply intolerable were that true. Quite necessary to the cohesion of his frivolous particles, is the occasional substratum of sentiment involved paragraph has its piquant tit-bit. In respect of elaborate cleverness, pungent antithesis and sprightly badinage, "Cecil" is probably the most remarkable of its author's remarkable productions. In plot, as we have hinted, and in delineation of character, it is subordinate to many. Cecil alone interests us. Emily comes and goes like a shadow; more might have been made, and profitably, of her ingenuous nature-when offended, a queenwhen pleased, a child. Lady Ormington is amusing; but besides such portraits as Pelham's lady-mother, and that admirable woman of the world, Lady Frances Sheringham, in Hook's "Parson's Daughter," she is insipid and unsuccessful. We expected more of her, for her first appearance told well; and we anticipated an instructive acquaintanceship with one into whose dressing-room we were admitted by stealth-there beholding on her ladyship's table, blue veins sealed up in one packet, and a rising blush corked up in a crystal phial, and a Pandora's box of eyebrows, eyelashes, lips, cheek, chin, ivory forehead, and a pearly row of teeth. "Her existence was all Watteau-all à vignette-all Pompadour in the stories of Emily Barnett, Franszetta, Helena, &c. Indispensable to the redemp--all powder-puff, all musk, all ambergris! tion of his character from sneering heartless- Time need have had gold sand in his glass, ness, are his intervals of sober sadness, his and an agate handle to his scythe, to deal parentheses of self-inquiry and self-condem- with such a life of trifling." Such the being nation. At such intervals, he beholds an who could be charming in company, when it aimless destiny unaccomplished-eternity was worth her while, but never played to flowing through his hand, like the limpid wa- empty benches; like the country manager ters of a fountain through the unconscious, who could not afford to give the snow-storm unenjoying lips of some marble Triton; the in his Christmas pantomime with white paper, conclusion to which he tends is the melancholy when the audience was thin, she often "snowdefinition of such biographies-youth a blun- ed brown," and was peevish and ungracious der, manhood a struggle, old age a regret. until further notice. Her husband, Lord OrThe narrative of Cecil's adventures is very mington, is of a class which no one can better loosely constructed, and herein greatly in- describe than Mrs. Gore, but which she has ferior to Sir Bulwer Lytton's performance, described far better elsewhere; the sort of which it rivals in wit and brilliance. It is a man one rarely sees out of England; reserved, collection of sketches, the only unity of which without being contemplative; convivial, withconsists in the puppyism of the narrator. out being social; cold, unexpansive, undeThis puppyism changes its aspects with the monstrative; one who quarrelled with the changes of life's seasons; it has its springy Woods and Forests, because they would not germination, its summer effloresence, its au- mend the roads with the ruins of Fotheringay tumnal ripeness, and its wintry decline; but Castle--and could perceive no irony in Hamin each avatar it is alter et idem. Mrs. Gore let's assignment of purpose to the ashes of has relieved the almost oppressive artificial imperial Cæsar. Lady Harriet Vandeleur light of the book by episodes of graver inter- is well done so far as she goes; an Irish woest; the scene which old Barnet at Cintra, for man, with a naïveté bordering on effrontery instance, which conducts us to Emily's newly-pretty, pouting, piquante; coquette, jili, dug grave-the Mignon-like picture of the Ital- flirt, angel: restless and artificial; her naiian dancing-girl-and the death of little Ar-veté calculated, her impromptus faits à loisir. thur Danby, are effectively rendered. But these are mere " by the way" digressions; the staple is coxcombry, its smart sayings and misdoings. Every chapter bristles with points; every Thérése is not a bad illustration of the spirituelle and sigh-away femme incomprise, united to an Apollo Belvidere fed upon oil-cake, and weighing eighteen stone. And a due source of mirth is open in the history of the Frau Wilhelmina, with her carnivorous and other propensities. But it is on English subjects that Mrs. Gore best exhibits her skill. again, Augustus Hamilton, a heartless dandy, who quarrels with a grain of pepper too much in his soup-the Alcibiades of Brook-street -a pretender of the vacant throne of Brum-" meldom-who forbears to enter the Opera pit during one of Pasta's airs, lest he should distract the attention of the house-who has the nicknackery of life at his fingers' ends, and can spout vertu in the choicest cant of connoisseurship; a cold-blooded libertine, moreover, and assuming the pride of the serpent, when he is, in truth, the weakest of worms. William Tottenham, another of the same The class of fiction to which "The Hamiltons" belongs, labors under the disadvantage of a promiscuous alliance of fact and fancy. Political life is the theme-the dates are accurately given the ministers and the opposition have each their role; while, at the same time, historical accuracy is defied--the Duke of Wellington is not himself, Sir Robert Peel is neither here nor there, and all is confusion worse confounded. In "The Hamil-order-lively and good-natured, so long as tons" we have political portraits, belonging to the period of George IV.'s decease and the Reform Bill agitation; but the food on which we are invited to banquet is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. The actors are neither quite historical nor quite ideal; there is a quantum of reality about them, but it is not a quantum suff. If political novels we are to have at all, it is more satisfactory to have them in a more definite shape-with at least two or three veritable cabinet ministers, masqued or not, as you please, but recognizable, and in keeping with the blue books and morning papers of twenty years since. One can enjoy, for instance, Plumer Ward's presentment of Canning (as Wentworth) in "De Vere," or our novel Chancellor of the Exche quer's kit kats, in " Coningsby," or the still less thinly veiled characters in "Wynville; or, Clubs and Coteries." But to be implicated in such a game as fast and loose-not to find unity of character on the right hand or the left to be tantalized by a chaotic jumble of elements, one paragraph taken from the Annual Register, and the next coined from the romancer's stock in trade-this has a spice of irritation in it. Some minds, however, may find naught to cavil at in this hybrid type; and those who do cavil, will own the dashing skill with which Mrs. Gore has ignored their possible objections, and delineated, in her own witty, whiggish, wilful way, a picture of official life in 1830. The performers are many and amusing. Lord Laxington, a privy councillor, with a jargon and technical dialect as inveterate as that of a horse-dealer; his arguments full of ministerial mysticism-his jokes all parliamentary-his notes of invitation formal as official documents-his anecdotes authenticated by dates; one who speaks as if before a committee, and scarcely knows how to leave the room without the ceremony of pairing off, or to hazard an opinion, lest he should be required to justify it to his party. His son, the sun shines and his hair keeps in curl, and his linen is starched to the sticking point; but whose wits will not suffice to pay his hairdresser's bill, and whose head and heart are alike bankrupt. Cadogan, the model of a "perfectly gentlemanlike man"--that is, by Mrs. Gore's interpretation, one who must not offend the public eye, ear, or conscienceneither violent in his politics, vehement in his affections, nor eccentric in his dress-one whose greatness consists in his mediocrity, and who, while following in meek subservi ence the dictates of society, affects unbounded independence. Bernard Forbes, sallow, saturnine, hard-featured, uncompromising, self-respecting, outspoken; in spite of his brown-holland complexion and quizzical coat, one of "those remarkable men who make up, with ninety-nine of mediocre capacity, the complement of every hundred of the human race;" dressing like a dustman, and tying his cravat as other men cord a portmanteau; but verifying the adage that it is often the fruit of roughest rind that is sweetest to the core. Claneustace-one of those characters which, "like certain minerals, remain soft during the process of formation, to harden at last into the sternest compactness." Susan, whom And then for the women. everybody loved-so mild, so benevolent, so forbearing; so unpresuming; such a patient, devoted, much-wionged nature as Mr. Thackeray loves to depict amid crowds of selfish, hollow-hearted men; an innocent, so slow to believe in the existence of wickedness, that she trusts her happiness, her person, the purity of her mind, to the keeping of one who despises all things good and holy; and in the development of whose career, Mrs. Gore has exercised that command of pathos which some critics deny her, as though she could only, at best, faire badiner la tendresse. Julia Hamilton pleases such censors better; a fashionable fribble, who plays an able game, both at the whist table and with the hand of |