1826.] Fashionable Novels. 159 
has grown disgusted with mankind, and to avoid them has fled to the 
Continent ; where, of course, the only inhabitants are sheep and goats, 
and there are no coffee-houses and hotels, gambling-houses and cassinos, 
profligacies and Palais Royals. Fastidiousness, the elegant reason for 
every gross indulgence, usurps the soul of the gentleman. The lady's 
soul is equally occupied; for in her agony of sensibility she marries / 
and sets out for Italy the wife of a rich baronet: but he is a booby, of 
course, and the lady soon reverts to the memory of the departed exqui- 
site. They meet, both equally sad, languid, and interesting ; both 
equally refined, heart-broken, and ready to commit any atrocity they 
happen to like. The lover is wounded by an assassin; the husband 
brings him to his house—for, by the laws of romance, a husband never 
has eyes in his head, nor common sense in his brains. The lady attends 
him, and with her own fair hands salves and cures the wounded hero— 
doubly wounded by her charms. However, both cures are effected 
about the same time; the lovers run off together; and the husband is 
left to reflect upon the awkwardness of a married man’s turning his 
house into an hospital, and having his wife as head doctor. The parties 
are for awhile in uncommon rapture ; all is orange-groves, rural felicity, 
asses’-milk, and the Bay of Naples. At length the lover is compelled 
to return to England for a week; the lady dislikes solitude, and could 
almost endure her husband again ; but in her wanderings on the shore, 
she sees a wreck, thinks she sees a corpse, and makes up her mind that 
this corpse can be no other than her lover’s. She faints, and dies in 
childbirth. The lover comes back alive and in high spirits, is shocked, 
kisses, and buries her. Thenceforth all his life is wretched, and to 
insure the absence of all delight, he returns (as well as we can remem- 
ber) to Paris, or some such desperate and solitary place, resolved to 
seduce no more, at least until he can find an opportunity. We hope that 
Lady Normanby is not in the habit of novel reading, or that “ Matilda, 
a Tale of the Day,” is carefully locked up from her Ladyship. 
Lord Blessinton, after three years’ travel through Italy, has announced 
his return by a three-volume novel of the “ olden time”—* Vavasour ;” 
a volume per year: severe work for the noble writer, but ten times 
more severe work for the reader. It is our firm conviction, that no man 
living has ever gone through that novel ; that no man living ever will go 
through it, and that no man living ever can. It is, of all the specimens 
of authorship that has met our eyes since Tom Thumb, the most inex- 
plicable, giddy, and unreadable ; it is worthy of his Lordship, and of no 
other ornament of the peerage above or under ground. The motto 
of the tale should have been from Canning’s Knife-grinder: « Story! 
Heaven bless you, I have come to tell, Sirs; only last night, a-drinking 
at the Chequers, this poor,” &c. 
The latest performance of the novel press is “ Vivian Grey,” immea- 
surably the most impudent of all feeble things, and of impudent things 
the most feeble ; begot in puppyism, conceived in pertness, and born in 
puffing. Whether the writer was any thing above a collector of intelli- 
gence in servants’-halls and billiard-rooms, no one of course could tell, 
for no one had ever heard his name before ; but the graces of a tavern- 
waiter, and the knowledge of a disbanded butler, are but sorry things, 
after all, to trade upon; and this miserable product of self-sufficiency 
was received with the contempt due to its abortiveness. 
