102 NOVELS OF THE MONTH. 



the pleasure we feel in such works, it lies evidently not in the objects, 

 for they are so familiar that we recognize them at a glance it is 

 the novelty of having them set before us with such exquisite fidelity 

 on a sheet of paper, that delights us, and proves the genius of the 

 artist. 



Almost the only objection urged, with either force or frequency, 

 against Hook's novels, is, that he dwells upon too often, and describes 

 too minutely, those formal trifles and consequential nothings, which 

 rational men would regard less as the vanities of those who are really 

 high bred, than the affectations of others who only pretend to a rank 

 which they are not really entitled to claim. For thus truckling ap- 

 parently to the impertinent levities of fashionable life, Hook has been 

 sneeringly called the founder of the silver fork school. But there 

 seems to be more pertness than truth in this censure. If individuals 

 are found amongst the great and titled, who, being allowed to set an 

 example in good manners, become the fuglemen of forms, and would 

 make it a mark of distinction that we shall never eat our fish but with 

 a silver fork, and drink sherry to cheese, for no better reason than 

 that our grandfathers drank port with it, the author who undertakes 

 to give an account of the society of the upper ranks, must par- 

 ticularize these creatures and their actions, silly and effeminate though 

 they be. But because the picture of these ceremonious vanities is 

 accurately modelled from the life, shall we swear that the author is 

 necessarily of one and the same mind, in such matters, with the cox- 

 combs he exhibits to us, and perversely prove the excellence of the 

 artist by establishing the want of judgment in the critic? We have 

 many novels which profess to describe high life, and not a few of 

 them are written by lords and fashionable people, but were we called 

 upon to recommend those works which record in the truest light, 

 with the greatest ability, and generally with a very just moral, the 

 faults and follies, the vices and sins of the peerage, aristocracy, and 

 monied interest of England, we should unhesitatingly lay our hands 

 upon the tales of Theodore Hook. 



A better founded objection to Hook's novels is, that the ground- 

 work of his story is often so improbable as to be almost unnatural. 

 This happens most frequently in his longer works; and the dis- 

 crepancy strikes us the more harshly, as his characters are almost in- 

 variably such genuine transcripts from the busy world. In Maxwell, 

 for instance, the whole machinery of three volumes depends upon the 

 all but impossible circumstance of a man hung at Newgate for mur- 

 der, being brought to life again by the surgeon to whom his body 

 was sent for dissection ! But at the very time this was published as 

 an event to be depended on, it was notorious to the least instructed 

 reader of Maxwell, that the bodies of criminals sentenced to be an- 

 atomized, were always sent to public hospitals, and that the dis- 

 section being as much a part of the sentence as the hanging, the 

 sheriff was bound to see it executed, and therefore attended while 

 certain incisions were cut in the chest of the subject. The shipwreck 

 which causes so many changes in the fortunes of the hero of the Par- 

 son's Daughter, is of the same extravagant character. When it is 

 notoriously so easy to make a lord, it is a pity a writer so ingenious, 



