Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/72

60 to, speak out when, to do so would be unseasonable and fruitless-but that where they would, and ought to, they do not—which is noticeable not a* a fault (for the author had good reasons, artful ones, for abstaining from sermonising), but as evidence how free "Valerius" is from affectation of the ower-guid. The book seems to have been flung off at a heat—not of enthusiasm; there is indeed little in its composition, whether we regard the story or the accessories, to belie the assertion that it took but three weeks to write:—"when he was writing 'Valerius,'" Professor Wilson is reported to have said of his friend and literary ally, "we were in the habit of walking out together every morning, and when we reached a quiet spot in the country, he read to me the chapters as he wrote them. He finished it in three weeks. I thus heard it all by piecemeal as it went on, and had much difficulty in persuading him that it was worth publishing." Mr. R. P. Gillies, too, has put on record his wonder at the rapidity of the same pen—which if surpassed by Christopher North's in the one article of fiery despatch, was its superior in systematic assiduity, and regularity of labour: Mr. Lockhart, the "Literary Veteran" assures us, thought thirty-two columns of Blackwood (a whole printed sheet) an ordinary day's work, involving not the slightest stress or fatigue.

Turning, however, from his first to his last essay in fiction, we find but too many footprints of the seven-leagued boots of this perhaps fatal facility. It was the scenes descriptive of university life at Oxford, that chiefly attracted public attention to "Reginald Dalton"—a kind of subject which has since found many another scribe, more or less conversant with and master of it; among whom may be named Mr. Hewlett, of the same university, and Dr. Samuel Phillips, whose "Caleb Stukely" illustrates Cambridge experiences of a like order. Maiden aunts and uninitiated papas must have formed horrible notions of Oxford, if they had within reach no corrective or alterative, to restrain and tone down the effect of "Reginald Dalton's" revelations—which are certainly open to [the charge of giving an einseitig and exaggerated picture of Alma Mater-ia. But the picture won eager albeit shocked gazers, by its broad strokes and its high colouring—and may, we suspect, have tended as directly to induce anxious "governors" to send their boys to the other university, as in later days the alarm at "Tractarianism" has done. The lively chapters devoted to Reginald's under-graduate career were devoured by those ab extrà, as an exciting novelty—and scanned by those ab intrà as a "refresher" of old times and cherished associations, not forgetting the once-familiar slang peculiar to court and quadrangle and hall and combination-room. A Town and Gown row, a bachelor's supper-party,—with the orthodox complement of pickled oysters, exquisitely veined brawn, and peerless sausages, served on lordly dishes of College plate, and magnificent flagons of that never-to-be-resisted potation, Bishop (a beverage which, thirty years ago, it was not superfluous for Mr. Lockhart