Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/171

164 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 court cards deidt to her in the long rubber of human life; who cares not to cast her eyes on a single female face, except the four queens, which strengthen her hand at whist, and who never lays aside her secret mail-coat of egotism, either in the arms of her father or at the footstool of her Maker. Mrs. Cadogan is a revolting sketch: a beautiful woman, who, by wearing a smiling face when discontented, has learnt to wear an innocent one while sinning; and whose mind contracts at last, in quintessential malignity, into the poison-drop that inflicts destruction on others. That she is unnatural and improbable is our consolation; the part which she plays, however, in the fortunes of "The Hamiltons" gives scope to some very powerful writing—unlaboured, indeed, and unpretending, but realising more than one scene of tragic interest.

But the comedy of artificial life is Mrs. Gore's forte; and it is when reproducing, in her brilliant way, the soap-bubbles and sparkling fire-flies of the "upper ten thousand,” that we feel her power; when she invites us to Mayfair or Baden, to gaze on her lifelike and highly-coloured "tableau," as Le Sage has it, "des soins, des peines, des mouvements, que les pauvres mortels se donnent, pour remplir agréablement le petit espace entre leur naissance et leur mort." A Burtonshaw family—a gossiping Pen. Smith—a Sir Joseph Leighton, "one of those fussy men, who insist on having dots placed on all the i's of life, and crosses on its t's"—in hitting off folks of this calibre, with a few smart strokes of her everlasting gold pen, lies her supremacy.

The tragical story of the Duchess de Praslin has contributed an adventitious interest to the intrinsic merit of "Mrs. Armytage; or, Female Domination." The book was a favourite one with that ill-fated lady; and a volume of it being found on her bed, stained with her blood, and subsequently deposited in evidence at the trial, it acquired remarkable notoriety on the continent. At home it has enjoyed the applause of divers and distinguished readers—among them, a lord-chancellor—peers, like Lord Holland, without stint—wits, like Jekyll and Luttrell, of vast dinner-table influence—and novelists, like Beckford and Bulwer Lytton, of ungainsayable credit and renown. The tale runs upon the injurious effects produced upon the female character by an extension of the rights and privileges of the sex. Mrs. Armytage is one who exercises over her children the utmost rigour of petty despotism—one whose love of domination had been allowed to progress into a ruling passion, by the indulgence of an inert and adoring husband—one, of whom her son affirms, that were he to fall in love with an angel, blest with a peerage in her own right and a million in the Five per Cents., she would be sure to raise objections. Her haughty temper breaks the heart of her daughter, the admirable Sophia, and bows her to an early grave; it