Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/35

Rh are traced with more of unctuous humour than is usual with the author, and, excepting the hurry-skurry of the finale, with more equable respect to truth. Miss Martha Compton's matrimonial tactics make up a rich piece of comedy—and the widowed career of the same adventurer maintains the fun to the fifth act. Showy, strong-willed, supple-tongued, audacious, garrulous, affected, tawdry, lynx-eyed, indomitable in her scheming, and colossal in her selfishness—was für eine Frau is the Widow Barnaby!—Then she is ably played up to by the other characters in whose portraiture unwonted skill is apparent: Agnes Willoughby, for instance—whose artlessness shows delightfully beside her guardian's systematic art; and Aunt Betsy, a worthy old soul, in excellent Keeping; and my Lord Mucklebury, whose flirtation with the "fat, fair, and forty" matron is wound up so smartly. Like all, or nearly all continuations, "The Widow Married" suggested invidious comparisons, and made admirers wish that "let well alone" had been the order of the day. It is perilous for an author to tamper with what has become public property, and in the disposal of which the public will have a voice,

To the same period belongs "One Fault"—a novel to which we should be happy to apply its own title, if we could; but which, we fear, has more than one, or two, defects incident to its constitution. It is a a story of a persecuted wife, whose trials are elaborated with abundant minuteness and frequent pathos; but it is deficient, to a marked degree, in action, in probability, in character, and in finish. Read piecemeal, or in the elegant extracts of a Review, it tells very well, and testifies to the nervous energy of the hand which indited it; but when conscientiously perused (in the grammatical sense) as a "matter" of three volumes, it drags, and droops, and would dwindle away but for the intervals of irregular vehemence which relieve the tedium. Its moral is good—to wit, the evils of morbid sensitiveness, illustrated in the "ways and means," of Wentworth; but the development of this principle is sufficiently eccentric and overdrawn to mar the purpose it involves. It seems too far removed from the level of actual life to make its didactic import available within that region.

"Charles Chesterfield; or, the Adventures of a Youth of Genius," is one of those novels of literary life—its double-double toil and trouble, its contradictions and absurdities, its hopes and fears—of which so many writers have made significant use, as Balzac and George Borrow, Thackeray and G. H. Lewes. The Byronian hero and-his gradual disenchantment pertain to a twice twenty-times told tale; but of course there is amusement and spirit in Mrs, Trollope's version, and even more than her average outlay of caricaturing skill and sarcastic commentary. The London coteries are quizzed ad libitum, and almost ultra licitem—and to the same sharp fire of quizzical artillery are exposed Whigs and Yankees, and sentimentalists alike of the German silver type and of Brummagem ware. Literary life furnished another theme in the instance of her next work, "The Blue Belles of England," whereof the title is its own interpreter. With higher claims to nature than its predecessor, it is its inferior in smartness and caustic power; on which grounds it is less acceptable to those who read the author for her distinctive