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PEERS AND PARVENUS. A Novel. By MRS. GORE. 3 vols. Post &va. London: H. Colburn.

IT may be thought by strict utilitarians that in a magazine like ours, intended, as far as it is possible, to aid in the development of all those principles, the application of which can benefit the many, that too much of our limited literary space is given to the notice of novels. It is, however, not without a motive, coherent with the design of the magazine that this is done. Novels have many recommendations. As a medium for conveying a knowledge of human nature as modified by particular manners and circumstances, they are of real service. And whether treating of remote periods, as in the historical class, or of distant manners and customs, in what may be termed (for want of a simpler term), the ethnological, or geographical kind, or as a means of conveying a knowledge of the morals, sentiments, and principles of one class to another, they are equally valuable as mediums of information. It is as one of the last class that we deem Mrs. Gore's writings of peculiar interest to our readers.

This authoress has, at all events, one quality which compensates to a certain extent for the want of many others. She has a style. All that she writes is clear and readable, and has that indescribable, undefinable power which induces the reader to proceed: arising, no doubt, from the distinctness of her own perceptions, and a great readiness of intellect, enabling her rapidly to furnish the means of expressing them. There is no complexity in her statements; her descriptions are never encumbered with tedious details; nor confused by the introduction of their remote relations. This, therefore, gives to her narrative lightness, and the reader proceeds unconsciously from idea to idea, and from image to image. Of the intellectual quality of the matter thus offered to the mind we have no great opinion. Character in its concrete state she has no power of delineating. She paints a quality and not a character; but herein she is but little inferior to many writers of a standard celebrity. Congreve and Pope did no more, though they might do it in a more potent manner. The portrayal of real character belongs to much fewer authors than is supposed. After Shakespeare, Addison (in a small degree), Fielding (largely), and perhaps Sir Walter Scott, we shall find but few of our celebrated dramatists and novelists who do more than pointedly portray a characteristic, either embodying an idea, as in "Pelham;" or working out a monomania, as in

Godwin's "Mandeville.'

Mrs. Austen's admirers, and Miss Edgeworth's, will probably indignantly demand for them an exception. But, if carefully analysed, they will at the best be found to personify by the welding in a logical mode a few qualities and characteristics. An intellectual Francatelli might really produce a serviceable manual that would develope the whole art of character-cooking in as methodical a manner as any culinary process. Mrs. Gore is then not to be singled out as deficient in this power; but it must be said she avails herself of the usual formula less logically than some of her contemporaries, less skilfully according to the received theory of human nature, as derived from observation or mental science. In "Peers and Parvenus" this is particularly perceptible. Resolving, after her fashion, to avail herself of the prevailing notion of the time, she has thought fit to put herself on the side of the low-born against the high. We are sorry to see this contagious cant spreading, because it is always the effect of cant to destroy the principle on which it fixes. The cant of religion brought on infidelity; the cant of patriotism produces reaction in favour of arbitrary rule; and the cant of sympathy undoubtedly will produce reaction on the side of brutality. Cant is a moral virus, destroying for the time of its course all the reticulation of principles.

That we must class Mrs. Gore's works amongst one of its results is proved by the ignorance displayed of the true principles that regulate the rights of mental superiority. Her hero, the child of the poorest peasants, is placed in contrast with the child of the most powerful aristocrats. The one is intended to embody the might of intellect, and the highest nobility of the heart-the other is brutal in his tastes, and narrow in his mind. But that this contrast is made, not because the truth of the principles is appreciated, but because it is effective, is proved by its treatment. The peasant has no benefit from Mrs. Gore's argument, because he is taken out of his class by the assumed superiority of his intellect; and there is not even any just advocacy of the aristocracy of mind. Jervis Cleve (the peasant hero) achieves nothing that marks his superiority to the conventional aristocracy amongst whom he is placed; on the contrary, he only ministers to the gratification of a more cultivated portion of those socially superior to him: he in no way vindicates his mental position by ever being placed in a position really to show the inferiority of the casual to the essential. It is only by the poorest and most inefficient means that his pretended superiority is portrayed; and very ignorant must the authoress be of the portrayal of genius, when she makes it consist in the publishing a learned antiquarian treatise in a philosophical society's papers. This alone would prove the inadequacy of the writer to the great impending question between the artificial aristocracy of custom and the real one of natural superiority.

The book has been considered in some quarters as having a democratic tendency, and it is evident the authoress had some such intention

regarding it. It is doubtful, however, whether it has not a tendency rather the reverse. Maintaining the privileges of hereditary noodledom to patronise the remarkable human productions, whether monstrosities of intellect or body; and thus affording the innumerable under-crop of aristocracy an opportunity of asserting that "genius is always patronised by its superiors when properly demonstrated."

Taken in its broadest view, it must have, however, an unintentional. democratic effect. And in common with all the rest of "the fashionable novels," it bears the most conclusive, because involuntary, testimony to the utter inefficiency of forms to fix essentials, and proves that no creation of orders and distinctions can make virtue, or genius, or even humane manners hereditary. It is from these admirers of hereditary aristocracy that we should call testimony to their innate meanness, self-sufficiency, and intense egotism and selfishness, that characterise those calling themselves "the higher classes." A more brutal, ill-mannered, and truly vulgar person than the ultimate Lord Hillingdon is made, it is impossible to conceive, and indeed than most of the characters that are here paraded as representatives of the highest nobility. The best are imbecile in mind, the dupes of the most obvious empiricism, and the worst on a level with the most debased churls.. Surely these novels, if intending to befriend a depreciated aristocracy, must call forth frequently from them the trite proverb-" Save me from my friends."

Though deficient in the best qualities of this kind of literature, there are delineations and observations that prove the authoress's capacity; and in Lucy Hecksworth, a woman of high conventional station, but of a fine and delicate spirit, we have suggestions of one of those truly feminine and noble creatures which a woman perhaps can alone give an idea of, in the depth of its deep passion and the unselfish purity of its affection. It is but a suggestion of a character, but still it vindicates the authoress's knowledge of her sex, and her sympathy with its profoundest and purest feelings. It is one genuine touch of goodness like this that redeems a mass of meanness, frivolity, and imbecility, which too often characterise the modern Pandora.

REPORT OF AN EDUCATIONAL TOUR IN GERMANY, AND PARTS OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, being part of the Seventh Annual Report of HORACE MANN, Esq., Secretary of the Board of Education, Mass. U.S., 1844. With Preface and Notes by W. B. HODGSON, Principal of the Mechanics' Institution, Liverpool. Fcp. 8vo. London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.

HOWEVER We may differ with the Americans on some political points, there is an earnest sympathy between the people of each country as to the progression and improvement of the grand body of the people. In

this point of view we are still one nation, though divided into two societies. The present little work is an admirable proof of this feeling, abounding, as it does, in information of the most essential kind.. It is well deserving of attention from all persons interested in public affairs, and indispensable to those engaged in education. Some idea of the method in which the subject is treated may be formed by the following:

"In the course of this tour I have seen many things to deplore, and many to admire; I have visited countries where there is no national system of education at all, and countries where the minutest details of the schools are regulated by law. I have seen schools in which each word and process, in many lessons, was almost overloaded with explanation and commentary; and many schools in which 400 or 500 children were obliged to commit to memory, in the Latin language, the entire book of Psalms and other parts of the Bible, neither teachers nor children understanding a word of the language which they were prating. I have seen countries, in whose schools all forms of corporal punishment were used without stint or measure; and I have visited one nation, in whose excellent and well-ordered schools, scarcely a blow has been struck for more than a quarter of a century. On reflection, it seems to me that it would be most strange, if, from all this variety of system, and of no-system, of sound instruction and of babbling, of the discipline of violence and of moral means, many beneficial hints, for our warning or our imitation, could not be derived; and as the subject comes clearly within the range of my duty, to collect and diffuse information respecting schools,' I venture to summit to the Board some of the results of my observations."

ANTONIO PEREZ AND PHILIP THE SECOND. By M. MIGNET, Member of the Institute of France, &c. Translated with the approbation of the Author, by C. Cocks, B.L., &c. Post 8vo. London: Longman & Co.

THE French authors leaving the rhetorical diffuseness that so long characterised them, have latterly produced works uniting so admirably the historical and the dramatical that they have become the models of modern historians. M. Thierry tells us that this style owes its origin to Scott's Historical Romance, and that the perusal of Ivanhoe, in which there was so much truth of matter, but so much falsification of events, led him to endeavour to impart to facts the same force that the novelist gave to fiction. Monsieur Mignet is a soberer writer of the same school: we miss the energetic painting of Thierry or Michelet, but we have still a vivid narrative of startling events. The half-barbaric time is well portrayed, and we feel that we are in the midst of a throng of high-spirited barbarians, and in an atmosphere of morals and manners far removed from our own.

Don Antonio Perez had a life of extraordinary adventure even in his extraordinary age, when life was held by the gravest civilians at about

the same value as a modern military hero would estimate it. He lived in an age of great action and little reflection, that is for the multitude; and one of which it would be erroneous to judge by our own standard either as regards morals or manners. Politics were conducted by the most subtle intrigues; deception had been reduced to a science, and was sanctioned as a proof of intellectual power. The forms and modes of the middle ages still survived. The struggle between the superior and the inferior chieftain had not been decided. Force was often called into the aid of craft; and the life that the executioner could not reach, although it was esteemed his due, was taken by the assassin. This last epithet, so hateful to modern ears, was by no means so in the days of Antonio; and therefore the murder, as we name it justly, that he procured for his master on Escovedo was by no means the atrocious crime that we should now regard it. His elevation to power, his struggle with his absolute master, his flight and adventures, and intrigues with the Princess of Eboli, are all very graphically and faithfully told, and as an illustration of the time, it is as instructive and interesting as the "Chronicles of Jocelyn de Brakelond;" we gather from fragments, or rather specimens like these truer notions of the actual condition of the period, than is possible from any merely political or philosophic histories. The one presents facts in a true view to the observation and the feelings, and the other an intellectual deduction from the sequence of cause and effect. One such narrative as either of these will do more to dispel the infatuated nonsense of those who would revive the forms of the middle ages than any argumentative refutation. Such contributions to history as "Antonio Perez and Philip the Second" are especially valuable to those who wish to form their own notions as to former times and former social proceedings.

OVER POPULATION AND ITS REMEDY; or, an Inquiry into the Extent and Causes of the Distress prevailing among the Labouring Classes of the British Islands and into the Means of remedying it. By WILLIAM THOMAS THORNTON. Demy 8vo. London: Longman and Co.

THE title of this book is not fortunate, for it seems at once to assume the matter in dispute, and to declare that there is over-population in the British islands. The term "over-population" is, however, much more logically applied in the body of the work, a very searching investigation being made as to the distribution, occupation, and condition of the labouring class, not only as regards our own country, but also as relates to the chief European kingdoms. Mr. Thornton then gives a rapid outline of the condition of the labourers in England since the Anglo-Saxon period, awarding to the Norman-feudal period the merit of best protecting and maintaining the agricultural peasant. The