our hero falls sufficiently in love to justify him, in his own eyes, for paying her all those little nameless attentions which unsophisticated young ladies are apt to mistake for unerring tokens of sincerity; and the result is, that whilst the utmost sacrifice he ever dreams of making for her, is a white-bait dinner with his more modish acquaintance, or a ball, her best affections are irretrievably engaged. The episode of her innocent entanglement, with the bursts of sensibility it calls forth, pleasingly relieve the scenes of folly, and ebullitions of heartlessness, which it is the author's pleasure to present as specimens of the art of living and the mode of feeling in the world. The colloquies with Lady Ormington, the jealousy at the parliamentary reputation achieved by his elder brother, the eternal sneers at patrons, patronesses, friends, companions, father, mother, aunts, and sisters, would probably have repelled the best sort of readers before the end of the first volume, had not Emily stepped in to conciliate them with her freshness, frankness, natural manner, purity, and truth. Nor is it the least agreeable of the reminiscences or associations connected with her, that she involuntarily becomes the instrument of detaching Cecil, during a brief season, from the habits and pursuits of coxcombry, and giving a somewhat more manly and ennobling cast to his character.

She suddenly quits London for her father's house at Lisbon; vague visions of broken hearts and wasted forms haunt Cecil in his gayest, brightest moods: he tries the most approved modes of inducing forgetfulness, including downright intoxication, but in vain; till, driven to desperation, he volunteers to become the substitute of a fellow clerk charged with despatches for Sir Charles Stewart, and at an hour's warning, without consent asked or leave granted from either of his respectable parents, he is off for the banks of the Tagus. The first thing that awaits him there is a brain fever, and it is only at the end of a month's lightheadedness that he is able to prosecute his search. With ardent hopes, yet still undefined intentions, he at length sets out for Cintra, and is soon directed to Mr Barnet, a mysterious old gentleman, accompanied by a very mysterious-looking friend. His reception is kind to cordiality, but odd; broken allusions and unaccountable enquiries startle him; he follows through room after room, and grove after grove, that seem redolent of the dear truant, but still no Emily; when slowly, reverently, and silently, they proceed to the remotest corner of a small green enclosure, and the old man sinks down upon her grave. She had died three weeks before, and the doting father had gone mad. Cecil, to do him justice, is on the point of following both the father's and the daughter's example; but after a second fever, and due deliberation, on

the impossibility of confronting London, cold heartless London, after such a catastrophe, he resolves to spare himself the guilt of suicide by imposing the labour of killing him on the French, and joins Beresford's brigade as a volunteer. The result is told in a few of those plain strong sentences, which so amply redeem this book from the imputation of frivolity :—

After a few months' desperate service, after volunteering in every rash attempt-leading a forlorn hope or two-and fording a river or so under the enemy's fire-new desires presented themselves. I still wished to die; but to die the death of the glorious. I hoped that a laurel might wave over my tomb, as a bay-tree over that of Emily. I trusted that, though my days were not to be long in the land, the fame of them might survive me.

The man who cherishes a strong ambition, of whatever nature, is in no immediate danger of dying of a broken heart. At the close of the year, instead of having accomplished my promises to myself or to the memory of the dead, I was alive, strong, vigorous-a good soldier—almost a good man !'

With a sneer at the pipeclay novelists,' which, surely, can hardly be meant for Cyril Thornton,' and a passing compliment to Mr Gleig, he surrenders all intention of interweaving any of his campaigning adventures in this narrative; and within a few weeks after the battle of Toulouse, where he is returned amongst the killed, he rattles into Hanover Square in a post-chaise and four, and prepares to resume his old part, with variations adapted to the popular taste. The military mania was then at its height; your fighting lion was the only animal of the species that had a chance; and had Cecil Danby calculated beforehand how three years could be best employed with the view to fashion and notoriety, he could have hardly applied them better than in bronzing his complexion on the Peninsula.

That was a strange epoch in the history of the female society of Great Britain ! The knight who suddenly flings aside his armour, is more defenceless than the simple clown habitually in cuerpo; and the English women who, during the visit of the allied sovereigns, laid aside their prudery to make a virtue of hero-hunting, certainly went lengths in the excitement of the hour, which it would be difficult to match in the histoire galante of less highly reputed countries. Had Byron lived to complete" Don Juan," he would have put anecdotes on record, in some of which I was an actor; in some, himself-such as might have made the tales of the Queen of Navarre either blush, or turn pale with envy.'

By a sort of natural reaction, he takes a sudden fancy, at the end of a three months' orgy, for ruralities, and is quietly passing his time between Ormington Hall and his brother's cottage, when Lady Ormington takes a sudden fancy for Paris, and he finds himself under the absolute necessity of escorting her. This visit

is obviously contrived for the purpose of introducing some of the author's notions of French society, and a clever sketch, à la Balzac, of a femme incomprise-the petted wife of a fat Councillor of State, who takes a lover as the only means of making herself understood. At the end of some sixty or seventy pages, in the course of which French morals are discussed, French politics fixed, and French cookery apostrophized, we are brought back to England, to admire a beautiful picture of domestic happiness, and then see it irretrievably destroyed.

The elder brother has now achieved the highest literary and parliamentary distinction, but is residing quietly in the country, devoted to his wife and child-a beautiful boy, worthy of the hereditary rank and honours in store for him. There he was '-little joyous fellow-passed lovingly from knee to knee, questioned by each of us in succession, with the view of eliciting 'the treasures of a spirit, bright as the souls of children, whereupon still lingers the effulgence of the eternal dayspring from whence they have so lately emanated.' Cecil grows as fond of him as the rest of the family, and is beginning to find a healthful consolatory repose in such companionship, when, in an evil hour, he is induced to take his little nephew before him on horseback, the horse becomes unmanageable, and the boy is killed upon the spot. To add to the bitterness of his remorse, the servants had been throwing out hints as to the imprudence of trusting Master Arthur so much with his uncle; and Lady Susan (a trait worthy of Shakspeare) had been induced to consent to the fatal ride, from an unwillingness to lend a momentary sanction to their fears. You see, Uncle Cecil, they could trust you to 'take care of me!' said Arthur, just as we reached Sandpit Gate; Coulson was a foolish old man, wasn't he?'

The death of little Arthur acts as a second sentence of banishment, and this time Germany is the country of his choice. He takes up his temporary abode at Coblentz, and falls in love with a road-inspector's wife; but is cured in a single day by her portentous appetite, unsentimental husband, and spitting-box. The termination of this adventure is kindly held forth as a beacon to the unsophisticated youth of Britain, who annually repair to Germany in search of Gretchens and Charlottes; but suppose some German novelist were to portray the feelings of a Viennese or Dresden exquisite, dining on roast mutton in July, in the back parlour of a tax-collector at Birmingham, or listening to one of Mozart's overtures played on a cracked piano by some boarding-school miss, whom he had mistaken for a goddess as she passed the inn window on her way to church in a new straw bonnet and a white muslin frock.

The breaking up of this illusion drives him to Switzerland, where he is joined the following year by no less a person than Lord Byron, his very dear friend, on whose poetry, theology, passions, principles, and domestic or undomestic habits, he takes frequent occasion to philosophize :—

'Gad! how we talked them over!

The young women who had wanted to marry us, and the old ones we had wanted to unmarry! The suppers at Watier's, the dinners at Holland House, the breakfasts in James's Place! I cannot conceive how Byron, conscious as he was of the deep sympathy of the few, could trouble himself about the antipathy of the many. All the master-spirits of the age went hand in hand with him. All the first-rate women and first-rate men despised the absurd calumnies which encircled him, innocuous as serpents hissing round the pedestal of a statue.'

Rather hard measure is dealt out to Lord Byron's female favourites, and it is quite clear to us that Mr Cecil Danby was never, in point of fact, admitted to the noble poet's intimacy; or he would have learned to speak in widely different terms of some of them. If ever there was a woman who did not belong to the ⚫ Betty Finnikin' school, or to whom the term vulgarity was less applicable than another, it was the Guiccioli.

English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German love passages, we have had already. Of course it was impossible to pass a winter in Venice without adding an Italian one to the list. The lady is of the gipsy, or, at any rate, vagrant tribe-a Mignon of a larger growth; she pays him a visit at dead of night for the sole purpose of relating her history, and he sees no more of her till she is drowned. He attends her funeral; Byron suggests a motto a very hackneyed motto-for her tombstone; and her name Franszetta, is intertwined with that of Emily (no great compliment to the latter) in his reminiscences.

This Italian interlude is over, and he is again in London, at the age of thirty-two; not, as he modestly anticipated, a stopgap at dinners and a supernumerary at balls, but, to use his own expression, enormously the fashion. Manoeuvring mammas and husband-hunting daughters were the making of him; for, since the death of his nephew, he is second in succession to the peerage and thirty-five thousand a-year. In particular, a dead set is made at him by a certain Lady Winstanley, a match-maker of the highest celebrity, who perseveres in forcing him into society with her daughter, a tall, graceful, queenly creature, a Duchess D. 'G, or at all events, by the letters-patent of nature,' till she (Helena) follows the example, and eventually shares the fate of poor Emily, by dying of a broken heart. Whilst she is pining away, he is once again a wanderer, yachting it about the world

VOL. LXXIII. NO. CXLVIII.

2 B

in the company of a friend. On his return, he at length condescends to accept an appointment in the royal household; and the book concludes with a promise that, though the public are to expect no Diary of a Gentleman by way of pendant to that of the Lady of the Bedchamber, his leisure will be entirely at their service, should they (through the medium of his bookseller) express a decided wish to hear more of him.

It is obvious from this rapid analysis that the author is a genuine disciple of Le Sage-that this is pre-eminently one of that class of novels, 'where the heroes pass from one situation in life, 'or from one stage of society, to another totally unconnected, except that, as in ordinary life, the adventures recorded, though not bearing upon each other, or on the catastrophe, befall the same personage where characters are introduced and dropped without scruple; and, at the end of the work, the hero is found sur'rounded by a very different set of associates from those with whom his fortune seemed at first indissolubly connected.'* deed, so rapid is the change of situation, and so frequently are we ordered off from one part of the globe to the other, that it would seem as if, in this author's opinion, the increased facility of locomotion conferred by steam had freed his craft from the necessity of paying the slightest attention to unity of place.

In

This plan, or absence of plan, however, has its advantages both for the writer and the reader. The one can seldom be wearied, and the other can never be dried up. When he has nothing more to say for the moment on English society, he can begin speculating about France or Germany;-a campaign in Portugal may succeed a flirtation at the opera; and Byron in Venice is no bad relief to Brummell in May Fair. It is quite clear that the book before us is indebted for the better half of its popularity to its digressive and discursive character; to the reckless abandonment of rule, social as well as critical, which enables him to blend himself with such a boundless variety of associations, to titillate so many vanities, to afford such ample room for commentary, to say something teasing, pleasing, coaxing, hoaxing, complimentary, or satirical, to every body. La Comedie des Visionnaires,' says Madame de Sevigné, nous rejouit beaucoup: nous trouvames que c'est la représentation de tout le monde; chacun a ses visions plus ou moins marquées.' Just so with this novel. The young ladies sympathize with Emily Barnet; the elderly ones with Lady Winstanley; the literary folks discuss the justice of the reflections on Byron and his associates; the dowager

6

*Sir Walter Scott's Life of Smollett.