The Youthful Impostor, a three-volume novel, is a disgusting compound
of blackguardism and absurdity ; the blackguardism garnished with pseudo-moralizing, the absurdity with a fine writing the peculiar property of the author. The story of this precious farrago is, nominally, founded upon the adventures of some swindler, who by an impudent trick imposed himself upon the fashionable world as the lucky inheritor of a large fortune. In any hands there was not sufficient vraisemblance in this ad venture to furnish materials for a fiction, but imagination cannot conceive the work Mr. GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS has made of it, or picture the minglings of times and manners—the outrages to probability, nature, and life—the nee pes nec caput—which are the result of his attempt. The only redeeming points about it are its fluency and a kind of galvanic force ; but even these are not adapted to the subject of modern life.
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