unless, like William Pitt, he is a great statesman at twenty-one, and has to defend his country against the world, when he may be excused from possessing any of the domestic affections in consideration of the work he has to do. The man who, having leisure to love children, hates them that man we would not trust with our purse, our secrets, our character, our life.

much worse in a woman!

But how

It would take too long to follow Becky through her chequered career her grand catastrophe, her exile, her ultimate partial recovery. Many of our readers were more or less familiar with her before seeing these remarks of ours; and such as are not, must have been tempted ere this to resolve that they will go to the fountain-head for information about her. We have only to observe, before taking leave of her, the skill which her biographer displays in lightly passing over some of the diabolical scenes she is concerned in, such for instance as "her second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra." Your true artist will produce infinitely more effect by just hinting at a horror, than a secondrate man can work by going into the most elaborate details. *

Some notice should be taken of the Osbornes and Sedleys who make up the underplot of the story. We have some suspicion that Thackeray finished up old Osborne, the purse-proud merchant, more carefully than he had intended at first, in opposition to Mr. Dombey, to show his view of such a character in opposition to that of Dickens. If such a comparison is challenged, there can be no doubt that so far as verisimilitude and nature are concerned, Mr. Osborne, Sr., has it by long

* We noticed a remarkable instance of this ten years ago. No one who has read Oliver Twist can forget the tremendous power with which the last scenes in the life of the miserable old Jew, Fagan, are worked out; but of the very last scene of all of his actual execution there is not a word. Contemporary with Oliver Twist, appeared an Irish story by one of the Irish novelists, which terminated with the execution of the principal villain. Every attendant circumstance was minutely worked out, and "the agony piled up" uncommonly high; but after all the thought struck us immediately, "How much less impression is made by all these terrifying minutiæ than by the half dozen lines in which Boz informs us that Mr. Brownlow and Oliver, in coming out of Newgate, saw the sheriff's preparations for the day's tragedy."

odds. There never was such a merchant or man of business at all as Mr. Dombey. His calm, icy pride is not the pride of a merchant at all; it would be in character for a nobleman or a gentleman of old family. We wonder Dickens did not make him one or the other. There was nothing in the exigencies of the story to forbid it. Noblemen are ruined easily enough now-a-days witness the Duke of Buckingham, who has just been sold out as completely as the veriest Wall-street speculator, to the great joy of all radicals. Nor is Mr. D. let down and made to relent in a natural, gradual and plausible way, as Mr. O. is; but taken off the stage as melo-dramatically as he was brought on.

The loves and fortunes of young Osborne and Amelia Sedley, are designed to carry out still further the attack on what formed one of the strongest topics of denunciation in the "Snob Papers," -that heartless system (flourishing to perfection in France, but deep-rooted enough in England) which considers matrimony as the union, not of a young man to a young woman, but of so much to so much. A splendid theme for indignant declamation, and one in which the satirist is sure to meet with much sympathy from the young of both sexes. But we must remember that the principle of union for love has, like all principles, its limitations. That two young people, long and fondly attached to each other, should be afraid to marry because they would be obliged to drop a little in the social scale, and deny themselves some of the ontward luxuries they enjoy separately; that they should sacrifice their hearts to those abominable dictates of fashion which Titmarsh has summed up in his Snob Commandment, “Thou shalt not marry unless thou hast a Brougham and a man-servant;" this is truly matter of indignation and mourning, against which it is not possible to say too much. But we must also protest against the opposite extreme the inference drawn from an extension of our principle that love ought to overcome and exclude all objections, want of principles and character in the man for instance; or utter want of means on both sides to support a family; or even what is generally the first thing to be disregarded in such cases - incompatibility of relations and friends. Sentimentalists talk as if love were to be the substitute for, or at least the

equal of religion, (it is the only religion of the French writers,) whereas, in truth, it is no more infallible in its decisions or imperative in its claims than ambition, or courage, or benevolence, or various other passions, which, either indifferent or positively laudable in themselves, are liable to sad perversion and exaggeration. The lover makes great sacrifices for his mistress; so does the ambitious man for his ambition; the covetous man for his fortune; and, to take a passion wholly and unmitigatedly bad, the vindictive man for his revenge. In all these cases the sacrifices are made for the same end the securing of a desired object for self; but because, in the first case, the object of desire is not the possession of a mere abstraction like fame, or of a mere material like money, but of another human being, therefore love has the appearance of being the most disinterested and self-sacrificing of the passions, while it is, in reality, generally the most selfish. Is this view a soulless and worldly one? We appeal to your own experience, reader. Of all the pur sang love-matches you have known - matches where one or more of the impediments we have mentioned existed how many have turned out happily? Nay, we appeal to Titmarsh himself and his own characters in this very book. Would it not have been a thousand times better for Amelia if she had married Dobbin in the first place? And might not George as well have taken Miss Schwartz as wed Amelia one month and been ready to run away with another woman the next? *

We must take leave of Titmarsh; for he is carrying us off into all sorts of digressions. We never were so long filling the same number of pages as we have been on the present occasion, for whenever we opened the book to make an extract we were tempted to read on, the same things which we had read a dozen times but there was no resisting. And when we re

on, on

*This is an element that never enters into the sentimentalist's calculation if sentimentalists ever make calculations the inconstancy of love. Could the continuance of a first passion be insured, there would be more excuse for putting it above prudence, and duty, and filial affection; but alas! it often vanishes in what D'Israeli not unfelicitously calls "a crash of iconoclastic surfeit," and then, when that, for which everything was given up, becomes itself nothing, the reaction is awful.

solutely turned our back to his people, it was only to think, and reason, and argue about them. How many of the hundreds of novels, published every year, leave any impression on your mind or give you one afterthought about any character in them? It is easy to take exceptions to the book we have taken our share; we might go on to pick out little slips, instances of forgetfulness, as where we are told first that Amelia Sedley is not the heroine, and two or three pages after that she is; or when the climate of Coventry Island is so bad that no office will insure Rawdon's life there, yet in the very same number it is mentioned how much his life-insurance cost him. But, say what you will, the book draws you back to it, over and over again. Farewell then, O Titmarsh! Truly, thou deservest better treatment than we can give thee. Thy book should be written about in a natural, even, continuous, flowing style like thine own, not in our lumbering paragraphs, that blunder out only half of what we mean to say. And do thou, O reader, buy this book if thou hast not bought it; if thou hast, throw it not away into the chiffonier-basket as thou dost many brown-paper-covered volumes; but put it into a good binding and lay it by not among the works "that no gentleman's library should be without" - but somewhere easy of access; for it is a book to keep and read, and there are many sermons in it.

OXFORD HEXAMETERS.

Literary World, June 1849.

The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, a Long-Vacation Pastoral. By Arthur Hugh Clough. Cambridge: John Bartlett. 1849.

THIS little book has been a puzzle to some of our Republican readers who are principled against Fraser. For as Mr. Bartlett has given no intimation whatever on the title-page that there was any such thing as an original English edition, they, seeing a book published

at Cambridge, Mass., and composed in manyfooted lines, that run over like too copiously filled glasses (extra water will produce the fulness as well as extra spirit), thought that it must be some progeny of Evangeline, either in the way of imitation or quiz. Whereas it has about as much to do with Evangeline as with Southey's Vision of Judgment. The English have been writing English Hexameters (and Pentameters too, by the way) for several years. We remember at least two partial translations of the Iliad, by different hands, and a number of poems, original and translated, the joint composition of three distinguished University men, Archdeacon Hare, Dr. Whewell, and (we believe) Professor Long. Indeed, there were plenty of Hexametrists before Longfellow (we speak of the present generation, without going back to Southey, much less to Sidney), but they are not often heard of on this side the water, because they want a sacred Bostonian.

English Hexameters have generally one of two faults. Either a uniformity of structure that gives them a monotony of cadence, or a carelessness of structure that leaves them no cadence at all. The former is the prevailing error of Evangeline. Every line in it is the exact rhythmical and metrical counterpart of almost every other line. There is no variety of cæsura or movement throughout the whole poem, and the monotony of the versification reminds us of a machine, invented in England a few years ago, which ground out hexameters to any extent, on the principle of the kaleidoscope somehow, and all after this pattern,

Murmura torva tubæ percellunt pectora dura,

every line containing four neuter-plurals, a Mollossus of a verb, and an Iambic genitive. "The Bothie of what do you call it," has the opposite and worse fault of using so many variations and licenses, that the majority of the lines which it contains are no hexameters at all, and can only be admitted as apologies for such by a stretch of charity rather than of courtesy. The author benevolently warns us, that every kind of irregularity

By this formidable expression the writer appears to mean a verb of three long syllables. Printer's D.

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