CURRENT LITERATURE.
on the questions at issue between Mr. Mill and the intuitive school. Indeed, the number would be below the average in interest, but for a very lively and humorous article on Mr. Lever as a novelist
which is extremely entertaining. The reviewer estimates the talents of Mr. Lover far above the mark at which we should put them when he speaks of him, as "if not the first, in the very first line of the novelists of the nineteenth century.'" But the article itself contains plenty of criti- cisms which are hardly consistent with this very favourable verdict on Mr. Lever's powers. We should certainly have doubted his claim to rank as high as Mrs. Trollope, and should put him immeasurably below her son ; and yet Mr. Trollops cannot, with all his wonderful fertility and wonderful realism, claim to rank, in reach and elevation of imagina- tion, anywhere near Scott or George Eliot. Miss .Austen, with her exquisite finish,—nay, Mrs. Oliphant with her very unequal but often very good work,—will rank far above Lever ; indeed, we have some doubt of Lever's reputation outlasting the century at all. But perhaps we are unjust to him. His reviewer here, who writes with a great vivacity and humour, is probably much better fitted to appreciate him than the present writer. The following will give some impression of the happy humour of the reviewer :—" Mr. Lever's dealings with money are truly magnificent—he confers estates with a generosity equal to that of Miss Flits, and never are his people so superbly lavish as when they are in hopeless difficulties. Then do they give magnificent entertainments, buy thoroughbred horses, respond with alacrity to every demand of friendship and every appeal for charity, dash about in post chaises, and stimulate postboys with guineas, live in profuse luxury, and exhibit a faultless taste in cookery."—The number contains an interest- ing paper from the Roman Catholic point of view on "Saints' Lives as Spiritual Reading," on Mr. Plummer's Translation of "Dr. Dollinger on the Popes," and a fair and just article on "Parliament and Catholic Education."
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