character of repose to the picture under his hands. He has lived much in the great world, and has carried out of it a taste unvitiated, a mind stored with observations, and above all, an uncorrupted heart. This last attribute is one of the most pleasing characteristics of the work, which breathes throughout a spirit of benevolence, and bears on every page the stamp of goodness. We occasionally feel that the writer is weak, often that he is diffuse to tediousness, but he never ceases to be respectable. There is a fine temper about the book which acts as a charm on the reader, and inclines him to a congenial mood of indulgence. He sees much nobleness of sentiment, and a keen relish for the beautiful in all its shapes moral and natural, in combination with feebleness of judgment; but he grants a kindly toleration to the failing, in consideration of the amiable qualities associated with it. It is the property of sun-shine to lend cheerfulness to the dullest objects, and of goodness to grace even error. We cannot explain why it is that a man uniformly exact in taste is often signally deficient in judgment; the same faculty which we call taste in trifles should be judgment in matters of superior importance; but we see that it is not so, and that he who comes to a right conclusion almost without the aid of thought, arrives, nine times out of ten, at a wrong one, when he applies more of his reasoning powers to a subject. He has a ready perception of beauty, fitness, and concord; there is, in truth, always a beauty, a fitness, and a concord, and how is it that in graver inquiries he does not catch a glimpse of these things, of which in trifles he has almost an instinctive apprehension; and that they do not give him a clue at least to a just judgment? If taste is not an undeveloped reason, how is it that it does not come in aid of reason? We have daily examples that it does not; we observe it superseding higher principles, but never guiding to them. There are many men in public life who are enemies to injustice and oppression, not from principle but from taste. It offends them to see cruelty,there is deformity in it, and they oppose it, because they dislike it; it gives them pain, uneasiness; it is to their minds as the setting of a saw or the grating of a slate pencil is to their ears. Others, without a particle of taste, or an atom of heart, concur with them in their conclusion, being brought to it by the light of their reason alone. Our author presents a remarkable example of the phenomenon we have noted. Wherever the demand is on his perceptions he is exquisitely exact, and discovers, without parading it, his critical apprehension of every shade of distinction in the objects he is setting before us; but when something more than perception is called for, when he has to penetrate and explore, to pierce the flimsiest disguises of falsehood, or to unhusk the truth, his want of energy and vigour is manifest. He has no wings for speculation; his strength is with sensible images. In the province of taste he is excellent, and he has certainly aggrandized this province, extended its bounds very far; but where taste ends and the higher judgment begins, he is powerless. In support of this position we could fill some pages with examples of extraordinary weakness, confusion, and inaccuracy of reasoning. Of logic we should infer that the author was entirely ignorant, and yet his writings give us an idea of so accomplished a man, that we can hardly prevail upon ourselves to assume him unpossessed of any necessary acquirement. Certain it is, however, that some very remarkable solecisms in the forms of argumentation occur in his book. In the dialectical combats a remark is often made, and a triumphant objection is offered, having nothing whatever to do with it. The fable of De Vere is inartificial and uninteresting, and it is barren of incident or stirring adventure. Those, therefore, who take it up as a mere novel, will probably lay it down with considerable disappointment. The plot is but the slender thread on which the author strings his pearls-his characters. De Vere is not a drama, it is rather a gallery of sculpture in which we see a number of finely chiselled forms, many of them admirable copies of nature, but having no relation with each other, except that indeed of the common kindred of truth. Our eye first reposes on one figure, and then passes over a naked space to another, and another, excellent but still there is every feature of life, but its warm motion is wanting, and the effect, though imposing, is cold. Among these statues are some perfect performances. There is a kind of moral centaur, a being, one half knavery, and the other the keenest sensibility, which is unmatched; it is a species of rogue which has never been described in print before, but the truth of it will be confessed at once, as it is often seen. Clayton, this sensitive scoundrel, is a refinement on the Blifil of Fielding; he has his sleekness, meanness, and hypocrisy, together with the addition of fine feelings, which stamps him an original character on paper, though by no means a rare one in the world. It is the custom of inferior artists to make their villains uniformly men of coarse minds and depraved, or, at least, merely animal appetites. Clayton is one of elegant desires, and when the master passion of self-interest does not possess him and turn him to roguery, he has a soul delicately sensible of excellence. An idea may be formed of his moral composition from this passage We have failed (says the author) in our contemplation of human nature, and particularly failed in delineating Clayton's character, if we have not shown that the strongest contrasts, nay contradictions, may sometimes be found in the same bosom, and that very keen susceptibilities are not always incompatible with considerable laxity of principle. That Clayton had an eye for beauty, and could feel even the raptures of tenderness through all the avenues to the soul, is no more than true; although beauty, rapture, and tenderness itself, could all be abandoned in a moment, whenever the finger of self-interest beckoned him away. While this beckon was not perceived, and still more, if self-interest lay in the same road with feeling, of feeling no man had a prettier stock. In short no man went beyond him in that sort of sentiment which emanates from the imagination, but has nothing to do with the heart. The character of Lord Mowbray comes next to Clayton's in merit. He is the Lord Westmorland of the political drama. A man with about the same tenacity to office which an oyster has to its bed, which rests undisturbed by a hundred tempests, and opens its shell for every change of tide-till in an unlucky hour it is dredged up and destroyed. Lord Mowbray is the head of a noble house, and the possessor of a splendid fortune, who looks upon office on any terms as the only basis of human happiness, and is content to submit to every kind of humiliation for the retention of it. The end of existence with him is place; this secured, the grand object is a lasting administration. Identifying his own convenience with the nation's good, he supposes that a permanent ministry is the main point necessary to its welfare. Of its composi tion, like some other greater men, he is regardless. If he is in it, that is enough-all is well. "At the same time," says his historian, "there was a part of his character which, for the undeviating consistency as well as energy that he displayed in it, entitled him to all respect. This was a notion of what he called political discipline. As throughout his career he had acted upon a principle amounting to sacred, of unqualified obedience to all who were above him; so even in his first advances, he exacted, to the letter, from his official inferiors, all that he himself had paid to those above him.* A subaltern in office, he used to hold, could have no opinion but that of his chief; a member of Parliament none but that of his party; and any show of deviation from these duties was treated by him as treason, and as such held in abhorrence. These, and other such maxims, were laid down by him in a manner little less than oracular; they were paramount to all others in his notions of government; indeed, they were almost the only notions of government which he possessed; for as to all great views of policy, foreign or domestic, he left them to those whom he at the time supported; satisfied himself, with supporting them." This Lord Mowbray is the patron of the parvenu Clayton, who having incurred the abhorrence of all honourable minds by some dirty work, a base piece of ratting, is judged by his noble protector worthy of a sinecure, by way of a salve for his wounds in the service. The minister to whom the request is urged objects, "It may gild him, but it will be with tarnished gold." "Gild him, however," said Lord Mowbray. This is one of those anecdotes which give a stamp to a character. It is impossible to misapprehend the manner of the man after hearing these three words reported of him. He speaks, and we know him. And this brings us to another fine stroke. De Vere reproaches his then friend Clayton for accepting the post "Far from accepting new appointments," said he with some indignation to the latter; "you should have laid down the old one." Clayton, in reply, deeply lamented the miserable state of affairs; wished himself a thousand times out of politics in some calm retreat, and said he had been inhumanly and unjustly treated by the ex-minister, whose cause he had always advocated, till he found him really too dangerously ambitious. But, in regard to his keeping or accepting new offices, he pleaded that he really was not his own master, but a mere follower of Lord Mowbray on that point. Nor could he prevent his patron, if he thought his honour concerned, from insisting that his accession to the new arrangement should not be stigmatized, either in his own, or his friend's person, and that therefore a strong demonstration should be made in their favour. "That," said De Vere, little moved, "would require some high notice of my lord himself." "You are right," returned Clayton, "and you therefore cannot be surprised if you find that he has accepted the red ribband." Nothing can be more exquisite than this misapprehension of Clayton. The high notice which the honourable De Vere had in his thoughts was one of a very different nature-a high notice to mark the sense of the purity of his uncle's (for such is Lord Mowbray) motives, but the parvenu instances the price of his meanness. *It is this which always makes the truckling jack in office so insolent to his inferiors. He thinks himself entitled to exact from them the prostration which he offers to his superiors, and it soothes his self-love to compel others to be as supple as himself. We introduce these illustrations, as we shall do others, rather abruptly, because in no other way can we deal with the book. Like Tremaine, the pattern is of such Brobdignag proportions, that we cannot reduce it to the limits of our pages, and all that we attempt is to take a bit here and a bit there, which appear to us of a kind that will bear insulation. The story we do not think it worth while to follow; it is so lumbering and void of interest. It is the waggon in which the characters are stowed, and it travels along at a snail's pace, with a prodigious creaking, and cracking, and grinding of its great broad wheels. To pursue the course of such a machine is not at all to our tastes, and our readers would derive little gratification from learning its different lingering stages; we shall therefore run before it or lag behind it, according to the temptation that offers. The character of Wentworth is obviously a portrait of Mr. Canning en beau; and the political incidents in which he figures strikingly and singularly accord with those which have just surprised and delighted the world. Wentworth, like the original, is a man of prodigious talents, which are understood rather than expressed; they are of an above-proof kind, and without evidence we are called upon to give him credit for them, which of course, as in all such cases, we implicitly do. In his little moments of petulance, the likeness between Wentworth and our distinguished statesman is very strong, and we are willing to believe that it is equally so in those of his generosity. Take it all and all, however, this is not one of the best characters. We turn from it to the two Flowerdales, excellent in their respective ways. The one a man steeped and starched in office, formal, worldly, yet-here is the talent-respectable, nay amiable; the kind of person whom we meet in the world and esteem, but who never before looked well upon paper. The artist shows his powers in making a good painting of so difficult a subject. His brother, a country gentleman, the very opposite of this, is one of those beings in the existence of which it delights and elevates us to believe. We would fain transfer the portrait of him from the author's canvass, but thirtynine pages present an insuperable obstacle to our wish, and there is not a part which we can omit without destroying the charm of the whole. We may give some idea of our author's manner by stating that this space is occupied by a dialogue over bread and cheese! Few, however, will, we think, quarrel with its length. There is, to our minds, great freshness and a fineness of tone about this quiet scene. Simple in its effect, but most elaborate in its execution, it is a sample of the style of the writer's labours, and an example of the difficulty of exhibiting his more finished performances in a narrow compass. He does not deal in bold strokes and grand efforts, but in minute touches and patient developments which remind us of the manner of Richardson, divested, however, of its repulsive homeliness. Indeed, though the author indulges in one or two quiet sneers at this antiquated model, we cannot but think that he has moulded his conceptions of excellence on it. De Vere himself seems to us à descendant of the Grandison family. He is a man of good birth, small fortune, and much pride, who cannot advance an inch in the world by reason of his excessive virtues. His uncle, Lord Mowbray, wishes to launch him into politics, that is, to qualify him for a placeman ; but De Vere has too much honesty and independence for this vocation. He refuses to creep, and not having wings to fly, remains a cypher. He is in love with his cousin Constance, the daughter and heiress of Lord Mowbray, but as he is poor and she is rich, pride forbids him to pretend to her hand. He is in every way unfortunate. He sees his mistress besieged by a profligate nobleman, Lord Cleveland, and his seat in Parliament stolen from him by his treacherous friend Clayton, and goes abroad in despair with Wentworth, who retires from political life for a season, for reasons which it is not necessary to our rough sketch to explain. At last, by a clumsy process, after the death of Lord Mowbray, his right to a part of the possessions of Constance is established, and he is blessed, according to the dispensation of novels, with all his desires, not, be it observed, by means of any meritorious exertion on his own part, but by au accident arising from the villany of his rival. Throughout the book we take no interest in De Vere. Pride may be a good accessory, but it is a bad staple commodity for a character, and we are weary of the set parade of De Vere's. The author has endeavoured also indeed to invest him with the charm of simplicity, but has miscarried, and in effect almost made him a simpleton. There are two more prominent persons whom we must not leave unnoticed, Harclai, and the President Herbert. The first is a common-place character; a man with a heart all benevolence and a tongue all misanthropy, such as we have in scores in the D'Arblay novels, et id genus omne. The last is a worldly priest; a kind of trumpeter, who though he does not engage himself as a combatant, is perpetually sounding the charge for action in the field of public affairs. How the author intended this personage to be regarded we do not know, but it is impossible to imagine him other than an unprincipled rogue at bottom. By the bye, he does the orthodox duty of the work; he is the mouth-piece of the writer's theology, and a precious organ he is. We shall extract a discussion, exemplifying the weakness in reasoning to which we have before adverted. The question mooted is the perceptible interposition of Providence; we regret to see such points agitated by incompetent disputants. "The time, as I observed," said the President Herbert," is over when visible interposition was the condescending mode of directing the world; for, unhappily for us, there is now No more of talk when God or angel guest "That must indeed have been a happy time," said De Vere; and to that sentiment his cousin, by her looks, evidently responded. "Instead of poetry, give me facts," said Cleveland. to it?" "What does history say "Will you believe history if I tell you?" asked the divine. "I will not believe Livy's silly stories of voices in the air, any more than my Lord Clarendon, with his sleeping dream about the Duke of Buckingham, or his waking one of Lord Brooke, at Litchfield." "You wish to touch me home," said the doctor, "in mentioning the last. But setting aside my partiality for my favourite cathedral, if you ask me seriously to say what I think, I am not one of those enlightened persons, like your lordship, who have so settled the matter as not to consider the circumstances of Lord Brooke's death as peculiarly awful.” "I have never gone by the spot where he fell," said De Vere, who had been most attentive to this part of the conversation, "without feeling it so; nor can I laugh at |