| | | There is a large class of books whose existence excites | our unfeigned wonder ~~ books, namely, which are of an | absolute and unqualified commonplace character. It is | easy to see why an author should publish writings marked | by positive faults. A man may easily mistake bombast for | eloquence, or gross vulgarity for ease and smartness; a | dwarf is just as fond of exhibiting himself as a giant; but the | curious thing is that a man who is just about the average | weight and size and height should offer himself as a show. | The impulse which prompts men to the Tupperian style of | poetry is profoundly unintelligible. How as it first revealed | to the author that he had been talking poetry all his life | without knowing it? What happy inspiration prompted him | to enter his geese for competition with other people’s | swans? If his works had diverged, either for good or for | bad, from the common pattern, we could have understood | his mistake; a rare coin may be valuable, however ugly; but | it is strange to mistake the halfpenny of domestic life for | something of unusual worth. Though we cannot fully | account for this curious vagary of human nature, it is of not | unfrequent occurrence in early youth. It requires a very | unusual stock of vanity to enable a man to deceive himself | much beyond that age at which prize-poems are generally | composed; but, until that date, a youth may be misled by | his very modesty. He has a prodigious reverence for the | trade of authorship; when he discovers by some accident | that his words can be actually put into print, and that they | read just like the phrases of other people, he thinks he has | done something wonderful; he is like a boy who has drawn | something which his friends understand to be meant for a | man or a house, and who immediately concludes himself to | be a great artist. This process is particularly easy for a | poet; when a boy has coaxed two lines into rhyming after | the due number of feet, he considers that he has done | something remarkable. In most cases this delusion | disappears spontaneously after a short time, or is exploded | by the benevolent criticism of friends. The youthful author | discovers the profound sense of Dr. Johnson’s judgment | on a moderate entertainment: ~~ His thoughts | are, no doubt, excellent, but he finds that they are not | worth putting into print. Occasionally, an author, endowed | propensity. In the first case, books are generated such as | the Proverbial Philosophy or Montgomery’s | Satan. In the other, we have gooks like Ugolino | or Hope Deferred. We must say that we | very much prefer this last variety of the genus. There is a | certain naivete about the novel which makes it | rather amusing than otherwise. We cannot say so much for | the poems, for, in accordance with a recondite maxim, | commonplace poetry must be reckoned amongst | intolerable things. | It will be enough to say of the poetry that a good deal of it | is of the cheerful nature suggested by the title of the first | piece. Ugolino discourses at considerable length on the | disagreeable circumstances in which he is placed, finds | time for writing a great number of verses on a wall with a | rusty nail, and finally becomes confused in his metre, and | even forgets to rhyme, in the agonies of starvation. We | have two or three other poems of equally lively tendency. | There is a benevolent old Jew, who curses his daughter, | Ernulphus fashion, for marrying an Arab, in consequence | of which her baby dies of thirst, and she and the Arab are | finished off by the simoom of fiction. There is a gentleman | who comes to life after being buried, and beats out his | brains against a door of the crypt. Then there is a certain |

“Sir Desmond,”

whose adventures are somewhat | confused. They end, however, by his finding his lady-love | in London at the time of the plague. She takes the plague, | and he goes mad, and jumps with her off London bridge, | apparently, on the ground that there is

“no foul | infection”

in the river ~~ a doctrine which would | certainly go far to convict him of madness at the present | day. Besides this, there is an account of the conflagration | of ladies in the cathedral of Santiago; a description of a | wreck, where the crew are ultimately all eaten up by

| “slimy monsters, slow and stealthy,”

and by certain |

“dingy reptiles, clad in scaly mail, bright, horny-eyed, | with long and lashing tail,”

who live down among the | dead men and the submarine telegraph wires; a | description of the massacre of the Mamelukes, who are | reduced by degrees to

“a dark, red, undistinguishable | mass,”

and various other lively and refreshing | subjects. Of the style in which the descriptions are written | perhaps the following will be a sufficient specimen, | containing an account of the discovery of the unfortunate | gentleman in the crypt. On finding the coffin empty ~~ | | Presently he is found in this condition: ~~ | (We should think so!) | Turning from this cheerful production to the novel, there is, | as we have said, a decided improvement. The extreme | simplicity of the manner of telling the story is decidedly | amusing, and the story, though gloomy, is not by any | means so full of blood and bones as the poetry. The author | indeed carefully informs us, in her preface, that ; | and, after speaking with a becoming diffidence of its merits, | she informs us of her hope that . We are, | therefore, prepared for a story without many events and | with a good many judicious reflections. There is, it is true, a | shipwreck in the first chapter, and the most prominent male | character is chewed by a lion in the fourth. This process, | however, singularly enough, leads to

“no serious | mischief,”

and the story is, for the rest of the book, | free from any very startling incidents. The chief point of it is | that the hero does not marry the heroine, being engaged to | someone else before the | opening of the novel. Their acquaintance leads to breaking | off the previous engagement, but the heroine has far too | much delicacy to take advantage of the change of | circumstances. She is, however, turned out of the house | and home by a testy old uncle, for having produced the | catastrophe. She thereupon becomes a governess, then a | stewardess on an Atlantic steamboat, and finally emigrates | to the far West, where she lives with an English emigrant. | The emigrant is a drunkard, and dies of delirium | tremens, and such is the solitude of the region that | she has to bury him with her own hands. The emigrant’s | wife dies of consumption directly afterwards, and the | heroine buries her with her own hands. After this she starts | with the emigrant’s child on her back, and in a few miles, to | our no small astonishment, meets a prosperous physician | driving along the road in his carriage to visit his patients. | This rather curious character in the Western wilderness | takes her home, and she dies soon after of overwork. The | other incidents of the story are marked by the same | delightful simplicity, and fully justify the author’s assertion | of their originality. | The chief peculiarity of the book, however, is the quaint | way on which the author turns to address the reader at | intervals. She is great upon the folly of reading reviews | instead of books. She lectures her female friends with | much force on the iniquity of not knowing how to hold a | baby. She points out, with more truth than originality that | and proves it by quoting a poem from | Ugolino. In another passage, she becomes so | eloquent in her description of the emigrant’s wife as an

| “uncrowned hero”

that she remarks,

“for variety’s | sake,”

she describes the character in verse. Thus, if | we don’t get much genuine novel, we get a good deal of | that sort of advice which is generally contained in tracts for | young women. In fact, Hope Deferred may be | described as a tract in two volumes; and, on the whole, we | think it is better than it would have been without the tract-like | matter. It is true that the novel is in itself almost childish, | and that the reflections, taken by themselves, would be | more pious than original. But the two are combined with a | certain naivete which makes the book (it is a very | short one) rather amusing than otherwise. There is no | reason why the author should not do better another time, | but her present work, if it were not for the odd effect we | have described, would be too uninteresting. It should not | have been published, any more than the student’s first | rough sketch should be sent for exhibition to the Academy. | But, as it is rather the simplicity than the vanity of the | author which seems to be at fault, the book, if weak, is at | least inoffensive.