196 MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 



and disgusting as those which are cited by the authoress of " Traits of Ame- 

 rican Life." Libels, gross enough and calculated to injure a country which 

 is fairly entitled to a very high place among the nations, had been written 

 and publicly spoken before the time of Mrs. Trollope ; but it was left for a 

 lady to enter into all the disgusting particulars of national vulgarity, and 

 indeed, waiving delicacy altogether, the business could not have been com- 

 mitted to better hands, for she tells her stories with a smack and relish which 

 show how much she must have enjoyed the drolleries around her. That her 

 books are written with talent cannot be denied ; but the order of that talent 

 is not very high ; and, if it were of the highest order, we should still protest 

 against the abuse of it in calumniating two nations, with which we are politi- 

 cally and commercially united, with the most beneficial results to our trading 

 interests. Mrs. Trollope's anecdotes, we have before observed, are told with 

 point, and her descriptions, though too manifestly caricatures, are given in a 

 lively and graphic style ; but when she has occasion to express her opinions, 

 which are of a kind that will happily ere long be mere matter of history, she 

 does it with a dogmatism and pretension, which even in a literary lady d'un 

 certain age is at least unamiable. The " Traits of American Life," as contain- 

 ing a homely degagee kind of narrative of her transatlantic trip, was on the 

 whole, notwithstanding its objectionable matter, favourably received on the 

 score of its drolleries. Its authoress speedily produced another work on 

 America, " the Refugee of America," a connected tale, put together for the 

 purpose of further introducing her readers to brother Jonathan, and to some 

 very beautiful parts of his country ; and within the last two months the Eng- 

 lish public have been presented with another work of fiction, not less full 

 of gall and hatred than any of her former productions, entitled " Memoirs of 

 Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw." The authoress's object in writing this work 

 has evidently been to expose the abuses of the slavery system in those 

 states (Virginia, the two states of Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, 

 Louisiana) which still disgrace themselves by the permission of that horrible 

 practice, and so far she is entitled to praise ; but it ill became her in the holy 

 cause of truth and humanity to distort facts so far as to make the planters of 

 Louisianian settlements the grossly ignorant and unsentimental beings who 

 have no community of interest or feeling beyond that suggested by filthy 

 lucre. Did Mrs. Trollope ever visit the south-western states, and does she 

 speak from personal experience of the habits and manners of the slave-owners ? 

 We think not ; and, little as we wish to screen them from the just hatred of 

 the world, we would not that they should have a charge of misrepresentation 

 against an English author behind which to screen themselves for protection. 

 We love truth and probability even in novels; and Mrs. Trollope must excuse 

 us for our frankness, or, if she will, for our severity. With respect to the 

 literary merits of the work before us, we think it, on the whole, much inferior 

 to those of her former books. Still the descriptions are some of them very 

 well and pointedly written in the same nervous sarcastic style as her first 

 satire on America : we instance particularly the opening chapters, containing 

 the account of old Whitlaw's squatting on the Mississippi, Edward Bligh's 

 visit to the store at Natchez, Lucy Bligh's reception among the milliners, and 

 the two more revolting accounts of Bligh's execution by Lynch law and of 

 the tyrant Whitlaw's murder by his own slaves. 



In the general management of her story Mrs. Trollope utterly fails, and 

 not less did she fail in the ' Refugees of America :' the plots of both are clum- 

 sily contrived, and exhibit the most glaring improbabilities, and the characters, 

 at least some of them, are drawn with an extravagant rudeness and coarseness, 

 which their conceiver perhaps mistakes for " breadth and boldness ;" while, in 

 depicting the more gentle- natured persorages which are necessary to the 

 machinery of the drama, she scarcely ever succeeds in raising their character 

 above the namby-pamby common-place individuals that form the mass of 

 society in middle life in our own country. What can be more fade and 



