158 Fashionable Novels. [Avue. 
discussion of abstract points, on which argument is blind, and decision, 
beyond all hope. On those points our ignorance has been baflled from 
all antiquity ; the power of the human mind is made helpless. by na~ 
tural want of light, and principle is worn away in disputation. without, 
use and without end. ) 
Granby, a novel of general life, followed.. It exhibited some amusing 
sketches of scenes familiar to London society; some touches of well-. 
known character, and a tolerably sustained tone of good manners: but, 
its faults were of an order that prohibit much hope from the author, a 
Mr. Lyster. It is altogether feeble; rambling, and sketchy ; evidently. 
exerting its best powers on its conversations, they are destitute of the 
force or truth of conversation. The principal character, Trebeck, an 
attempted portrait of Beau Brummell, is a bore—a tiresome, stiff, affected 
bore, with but little of the dexterous phraseology, or even of the clever 
facility of idea, by which that ingenious and contemptible person con-. 
trived to make himself the talk of his little day. 
The publisher of those novels, it must be acknowledged, omitted 
none of the usual means of exciting popularity. As Sheridan in the 
“ Critic” says, “‘ The newspapers seldom agree; but when they do, 
their unanimity is wonderful.” Their unanimity on this publisher's 
productions was miraculous indeed; the same panegyric, in the same 
words, was discoverable in them all at the same moment; and the 
system of anticipatory criticism may be said to have reached its bounds. 
John Bull, for once. agreed from its inmost soul with the Morning 
Chronicle, and the Old Times echoed the inspirations of the New. The 
Morning Post adopted the strain; and whether the object of the 
criticism was ponderous quarto or light duodecimo, solemn political 
foolery, or the small-talk of the smallest bluestockingism, the pane- 
gyric was equally abundant, vigorous, and ddentical. _“ There are more 
things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy ;” and 
the causes of this incomparable coincidence are among them. These 
are profound secrets of literature; the mutual arcana of publishers and 
newspaper editors ; the last matchless evidences, that the interests of all 
the lovers of learning are “ one and indivisible,” from the amount of five 
shillings to as many guineas. 
Lord John Russell, that man of many trades—politician, historian, 
biographer, tragedian, public orator, Whig in general, and Ex-member 
of Parliament, in particular—some time since attempted to pluck a new 
leaf from Parnassus by a romance. It was small, foreign, feeble, and 
despatched among “ our noble relatives and patriotic partizans in enve- 
lopes of the finest glazed paper, sealed with an Italian motto, and per- 
fumed with attar and musk. The work was worthy of this exquisite- 
ness of wrapper, and had its half-hour of fashion among those whe, as 
Mr. Hoby said, were to be “ looked for among the B's.” It was some 
supposed adventure of a British officer with a Peninsular nun—but it is 
gone, and its “ place knoweth it no more.” 
This promises to be the age of “noble” if not.“ royal authors.” Lord 
Normanby has lately written “ Matilda, a Tale ;” and his Lordship 
might as well have informed us in the title, a tale of seduction. ‘The 
lovers are, as it becomes the seducer and the seduced to be, both charm- 
ing—both supremely delicate and high-bred, and virtuous, and unhappy ;. 
they have met once in the world of high-life, and loved and separated in 
furious despair—no man under heaven can tell why. The gentleman 
