Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/303

 Reviews and Notes 297 the two unconvincing sentences devoted to Miss Austen's Mansfield Park, and the single paragraph commenting upon all of Mrs. Eliza Hay wood's work; sometimes narrowly confined to one aspect, as in the discussion of Defoe's novels from the ethical point of view; and sometimes of really informative and critical interest, as in the review of Mrs. Radcliffe's works. These summaries are often accompanied by excerpts from the novels, and by brief comparisons to earlier and later novels presenting likenesses, often superficial, in situation or purpose. As an example of these enumerations which seem to stand for the study of persistent motive originally announced, the following may be quoted from the discussion of Humphry Clinker : "We are at once fascinated with genial Mat who is a lineal descendant of Parson Adams, Uncle Toby, Dr. Primrose, and Henry Brooke's Mr. Fenton. Matthew Bramble passes on the legacy of a tender heart to Bulwer-Lytton's Captain Roland Caxton and Thackeray's Colonel Newcome; and in the study of Tabitha there is a link action between Mrs. Grizzle and Becky Sharp, whose lighter counterpart is Trollope's Lizzie Eustace in the Eustace Diamonds (1872). Even the dog Chowder barks his way to the pug in Susan E. Ferrier's Marriage (1818), to Dora's Jip in Dickens's David Copperfield, and to the only friend Bill Sykes had." (p. 114.) The volume concludes with a good index, but without the bibliography which would have been of use to students less widely read in the minor fiction of the nineteenth century, or without access to such little known works of the latter part of the eighteenth as the anonymous Adventures of Emmera, or the Fair American (1767). The work as a whole represents prolonged travel along the highways of purely English fiction of nearly five centuries, and some investigation of the bye-ways. It is to be regretted that in addition to his own extensive observations of this material Mr. Whiteford does not make use of recent intensive studies in the history of fiction and related types. For in addition to certain weaknesses of organization already suggested, the book suffers generally on the scientific side from the lack of a more historical point of view such as might, for example, relate Defoe's works to the stones of travel and to the criminal biog- raphies and narratives abundantly popular in the seventeenth century ; Richardson, to the rising sentimentalism, and to the interest in bourgeois domestic life apparent in drama, poetry, and periodical essay, as well as in the fiction of the early eighteenth; and the English fiction of those formative decades, to the mass of garbled translation of the fiction of France and Spain, widely read and imitated in England, and of undoubted influence upon the manner and matter of English fiction of the period.