It is well that hard words break no bones, else two or three gentlemen
of literary notoriety would be in a sorry plight after reading the
following passage in a recent _Magazine_. We stand by, and like
the fellow in the play, bite our thumb:--
"Surely, surely, all men, women, and children, not cursed with the
fatuity that would become a vice-president of the Phrenological Society,
must by this time be about heartsick of what are called Novels of
Fashionable Life. Only two men of any pretensions to superiority of
talent have had part in the uproarious manufacture of this ware, that
has been dinned in our ears by trumpet after trumpet, during the last
six or seven years. Mr. Theodore Hook began the business--a man of such
strong native sense and thorough knowledge of the world as it is, that
we cannot doubt the _coxcombry_ which has drawn so much derision on his
_sayings_ and _doings_ was all, to use a phrase which he himself has
brought into fashion, _humbug_. He could not cast his keen eyes over any
considerable circle of society in this country, without perceiving the
melancholy fact, that the British nation labours under a universal mania
for gentility--all the world hurrying and bustling in the same idle
chase--good honest squires and baronets, with pedigrees of a thousand
years, and estates of ten thousand acres--ay, and even noble lords--yea,
the noblest of the noble themselves (or at least their ladies), rendered
fidgety and uncomfortable by the circumstance of their not somehow or
other belonging to one particular little circle in London. Comely
round-paunched parsons and squireens, again, all over the land, eating
the bread of bitterness, and drinking the waters of sorrow, because
they are, or think they are, tipt the cold shoulder by these same
honest squires and baronets, &c. &c. &c. who, excluded from Almack's,
in their own fair turn and rural sphere enact nevertheless, with much
success, the part of _exclusives_--and so downwards--down to the very
verge of dirty linen. The obvious facility of practising lucratively
on this prevailing folly--of raising 700_l_., 1000_l_., or 1500_l_.
per _series_, merely by cramming the mouths of the asinine with
mock-majestic details of fine life--this found favour with an indolent
no less than sagacious humorist; and the fatal example was set. Hence
the vile and most vulgar pawings of such miserables as Messrs. Vivian
Grey and "The Roue"--creatures who betray in every page, which they
stuff full of Marquess and My Lady, that their own manners are as gross
as they make it their boast to show their morals. Hence, some two or
three pegs higher, and not more, are such very very fine scoundrels
as the Pelhams, &c.; shallow, watery-brained, ill-taught, effeminate
dandies--animals destitute apparently of one touch of real manhood,
or of real passion--cold, systematic, deliberate debauchees,
withal--seducers, God wot! and duellists, and, above all, philosophers!
How could any human being be gulled by such flimsy devices as these?
"These gentry form a sort of cross between the Theodorian breed of novel
and the Wardish--the extravagantly overrated--the heavy, imbecile,
pointless, but still well-written, sensible, and, we may even add, not
disagreeable, Tremaine and De Vere. The second of these books was a mere
_rifacimento_ of the first; and, fortunately for what remained of
his reputation, Mr. Robert Ward has made no third attempt. He has much
to answer for; _e.g._ if we were called upon to point out the most
disgusting abomination to be found in the whole range of contemporary
literature, we have no hesitation in saying we should feel it our duty
to lay our finger on the Bolingbroke-_Balaam_ of that last and
worst of an insufferable charlatan's productions."--_Devereux_.
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