Monthly Review of Literature. 545 



** My position is a fearful one, and becomes every day more precarious. 

 The state of incessant agitation and alarm in which this wretch plunges me 

 has destroyed my health ; and there are moments when I feel such a total 

 prostration of physical as well as moral strength, that I am led to think I 

 cannot long sustain this life of wretchedness. This man is my scourge the 

 avenger of all my sins. Oh ! may the Almighty accept the pangs I now 

 endure as some atonement for my transgressions, and limit my suffering to 

 this life ; permitting me to hope that, in the life to come, I may be pardoned. 



" Should my prophetic forebodings be realized should death soon end the 

 insupportable anguish I endure, I entreat nay, more, I command you, Del- 

 phine, to make known to Lord and Lady Vernon, and Lord Annandale, the 

 perfect innocence of the wronged Augusta." 



The Married Unmarried. By the Author of " Almack's Revisited," 

 3 Vols. post 8vo. Saunders and Otley. 



THIS tale, whose title seems to us singularly ill-chosen, inasmuch as we .can 

 find no sense in it till we arrive at the last chapter, is the history of a young 

 Jellow of unknown parentage, who goes through a series of hardships and 

 %dd adventures, until at last he finds that he is the son of an admiral, and 

 that his mother has unwittingly been guilty of bigamy. The whole seems to 

 us to be a huge mass of improbability ; arid although there are passages in 

 certain parts, which induce the belief that its author is not destitute of talent, 

 we cannot give to it, as a whole, any thing beyond qualified praise. The 

 motto is better chosen than the title, and pretty fairly characterizes the 

 book. 



" Part good, more bad, some neither one nor t'other." 



Memoirs of a Peeress,- or, the Days of Fox. Edited by LADY 

 CHARLOTTE BURY. 3 Vols. post 8vo. Colburn, 



MR. HENRY COLBURN is one of the most polite and obliging of publishers, 

 and, at the same time, strange to say, the most successful. His impri- 

 matur at the bottom of the title is like the note of a bank of high credit: 

 worthless as the material is, it passes for an article of sterling value, for it 

 has the assurance of its issuer's respectability. Mr. Colburn's respectability 

 must stand high indeed ; nay, caput inter nubila condit, if we are to judge 

 of it by the multitudinous trash to which he gives currency at least, if not 

 a good name. To deny the possession of excellence to all the works and all 

 their authors that bask in the sunshine of the politest of bibliopolists, would 

 be going too far ; but, from an examination of the Maryborough Street lists, 

 we do not hesitate to set down two-thirds of their contents during the present 

 season, as being so poor, washy, and uninteresting, that nothing but the 

 Colburn influence and puffery could remove them from the shelves to which 

 the printer delivered them. Let not our meaning be mistaken : let it not be 

 supposed that we attribute any fault to Mr. Colburn for doing what every 

 trader has an undoubted right to do, advancing his own interests by those 

 means and connexions which he finds most desirable : the fault lies with 

 the public, and that part of it in particular, which, lapped in luxury, is too 

 lazy to judge a work by its own merits, and is content to believe a book 

 good, because it has a titled author or a good publisher. 



Lady Charlotte Bury's book, the title of which would induce the reader to 

 anticipate a real memoir of a real personage and an account of some of the 

 scenes in which Fox, Sheridan, and the Prince of Wales played so conspicuous 

 a part, turns out, after all, to be nothing but a mere novel and quite a 

 second rate one too, founded on the "Red-Book," "Annual Register," and 

 newspapers of the day, and furnished with an obligate accompaniment 

 of wit and viracity by the lady who edited it. It may be, that we are mis- 

 taken in our view of the subject, and that a great part, at least, of these 



MAY, 1837, 2 N 



