NOVELS OF THE MONTH. 103 



should be obliged to travel out of the common course of things to 

 unmake one. 



But if there is a hardness of invention in some of Hook's plots, 

 and a straining after effect in many of his incidents, the fault is libe- 

 rally set off. His characters, one and all, are the flesh and blood of 

 real life ; he walks along the street, or enters a drawing-room, and 

 picks his men and women as they stand out in society. He sees them, 

 hears them speak; and they stand committed to his memory intus et 

 incut e. Woodfall, the great reporter, used to take his seat in the gallery 

 of the House of Commons, listen to the speeches, go home, drink his 

 grog, get to bed, and next morning put down on paper a more faithful 

 report of all that was said, than the other " gentlemen of the press," who 

 took notes all the while. Some faculty of the same singular kind must 

 belong to Hook. He meets the sort of person he can turn to ac- 

 count, and reads him inside and out in ten minutes. He says, " how 

 do ye do ?" and by the time the poor devil has answered " pretty 

 well, I thank ye," Hook has entered his soul and possessed his whole 

 nature. He smiles, dines, and drinks wine with his victim as if no- 

 thing had happened, and nothing was meant ; smokes his cigar, nods 

 asleep, and next day the " marked man" is in print. In short, Hook 

 is a phenomenon vampire, who seizes men's natures by a species of 

 spiritual imagination, and leaves them nothing the poorer for the 

 abstraction. 



(l Gale Middleton" is by Horace Smith, an author who in one respect 

 has been one of the most fortunate literary men of his time. His 

 early and lighter productions gained him a reputation which his 

 latter works have not added to, and yet these continue to " go oft' 

 well," as they say in the Row, in a great measure upon the strength 

 of the favour which the former conciliated. He first became known 

 in letters by the ' Rejected Addresses/ and afterwards by a series of 

 Papers, part poetry and part prose, in Colburn's opposition Magazine, 

 when that Periodical was in its younger and happier days. These Ma- 

 gazine Papers were meant to illustrate and preserve the elegancies and. 

 peculiarities of that egregious race of citizens who delight in such 

 euphonious cognomens as Hobbs, Dobbs, Snobbs, &c., and, like the 

 Rejected Addresses, were considered the joint production of Horace, 

 and his brother James, an Attorney-at-Law, and, his profession apart, 

 certainly a right agreeable gentleman. Into the peculiar merit of 

 these effusions it were now irrelevant to enter : they brought money 

 and reputation ; and upon the strength of the latter, Horace Smith 

 became a writer of novels upon his sole and separate account. But 

 his labours, and they are not few, in this more independent character, 

 have not been so highly thought of by the critical world. As a man, 

 we believe that he has many virtues ; there are strong indications of 

 great goodness of nature and rectitude of mind in his works; but as 

 an author, we apprehend that the judgment is correct which has 

 pronounced him to he generally uninteresting when original, and a 

 copyist when most entertaining. Of the two cases, the latter occurs the 

 oftener, and he is therefore the cherished of the Circulating Libraries, 

 where the literary appetite is generally too voracious to be nice, and 

 where a name, once obtained, endures, perhaps, longer, than in any 



