Monthly Review of Literature. 205 



them from the daily and weekly periodicals. We shall, therefore, only pass 

 a comment on each of the articles as they pass us in turning over the pages 

 of the volume before us. 



" The streets by morning " are very good, and could not have been more 

 truly delineated in a book intended for general readers. " The streets by 

 night " are tolerable ; but they are not such as we might have looked for from 

 Boz : they are trite and common- place. " Making a night of it" is very 

 good indeed, quite a nonpareil in its way, " Criminal Courts " contains some 

 humour ; but the subject is sombre at best, and cannot be made otherwise. 

 The painter has done his best with a bad subject Passing over " Scotland 

 Yard " and " the New Year," we proceed to the " Meditations in Monmouth 

 Street," which seem to us ingenious, but far-fetched : and the conclusion is 

 certainly very clumsily contrived. " Our next-door neighbours " is very good 

 indeed, and remarkably characteristic of suburban lodging-house peculiari- 

 ties. We once knew a gentleman, not a hundred miles from the Elephant 

 and Castle, whose guests' habits as well as his own must have been a mortal 

 annoyance to the next-door neighbour. We are glad to say that we were the 

 guests, not the next door neighbour. " The hospital patient " is stale, as 

 well as sorrowful. " Seven dials " is quite a la CruikshanJcs, pointed and 

 witty, but eminently vulgar, as it ought to be. " The Mistaken Milliner " 

 and "Doctors* Commons " are both above the ordinary run of comic papers ; 

 and, what is better, both furnish a moral lesson of considerable value. "John 

 Douncer" an aged love, is well rewarded, and may be a caution to some of 

 Boz's mature, but still uxorious readers. "A Parliamentary Sketch" is poor, 

 and might, as we think, have been done much better by many other fre- 

 quenters of the Reporters' Gallery. Boz has hit two characters, where he 

 might have transfixed at least twenty. He is far more successful with Mr. 

 Minns and his vulgar cousin Mr. Budden. Nothing can be better than the 

 portraiture of the vulgar Budden and his domestic arrangements. " Thelast 

 Cab-driver" is redolent with vulgarity, "but deficient in wit. No one, how- 

 ever, can doubt that the author is a " student in the life," The last of Boz's 

 sketches is more truly like Hogarth's, than any of his that we recollect to 

 have seen. Hogarth is usually regarded as a comic painter and caricaturist. 

 There never was a greater mistake made by his would-be critics and admirers. 

 The fact is, there has seldom been a more acute observer of morals than 

 Hogarth ; and the very accuracy of the painter's observation has convinced 

 him, that in common life the tragic seldom or never is found, except in close 

 connexion with the broad comic. In short, du sublime au ridicule il n'y qu'un 

 pas. The combination of the truly tragic with the truly comic elements in 

 proper harmony constituted, in our opinion, Hogarth's great excellence, and 

 made him effectually a good moralist in spite of the grossieretes that occa- 

 sionally deface his pictures. It is no slight compliment that we intend for 

 Boz, when we grant him a place even at the feet of Hogarth. " The Drunk- 

 ard's Death" contains all the tragedy that low and degraded life can furnish : 

 and we know none, unless it be Professor Wilson himself, who could have 

 done more justice to so difficult a subject. 



We now take leave of our old friend, and once more very heartily congra- 

 tulate him on the solid approvals that his comic genius has won from the 

 laughter-loving public. 



Lionel Wakefield. By the Author of "Sydenham." 3 vols. post 8vo. 



Bentley. 



THE writer of this book (which ought to have been earlier noticed) has evi- 

 dently tried to engraft the style and sentiment of the eighteenth century on 

 the fashions and social peculiarities of the nineteenth ; and in attempting so 

 absurd a thing he has most miserably failed. Smollett depicted with inimita- 

 ble power the society that is, the middle-life society of his own time ; but 



