15 DECEMBER 1860, Page 18

THORNBITRY'S T1TREISH LIFE AND CHARA.CTER. * WE could have guessed, even

if the author had not stated. the fad in his preface that these volumes have grown out of a series of papers in weekly journals. Nearly half the chapters they con- tain are new, but the rest are with one exception' revised and enlarged reprints from All tile Year Round and Chambers's ; and while they retain in their developed form ingrained marks of the conditions under which they were first embodied, the new chapters are modelled after their likeness. The book is, there- fore, homogeneous in composition, and it presents a remarkable example of a style denaturalized by certain exigencies of periodi- cal literature. Its great fault is an incessant appearance of effort —the fault of an artist who has made it a law unto himself never to conceal his art. This perversity might be tolerated, or might pass unnoticed, in a writer of short detached papers ; but it pro- vokes grave dissatisfaction when its effects are manifested throughout six hundred consecutive pages. The evil in the pre- sent instance will be best remedied by reading Mr. Thornbury's book, not continuously, but by instalments, one chapter at a time, with an interval of a week at least between every two. Mr. Thornbury would probably object to this proposal ; indeed he has in a manner protested against it by anticipation ; for he says that all his chapters were written with a steadily maintained har- monious purpose, and could no more be judged of separately, be- fore being arranged into a book, than the pieces of a Chinese puzzle can be before being fitted into the snug box that gives them unity, symmetry, and purpose." If this be so, taut pis pour lui, for his book, with all its cleverness, is not easily readable as a whole. Its author will not take it amiss if we compare him to Mrs. Hemans, a lady whose rare talents were almost universally mistaken for genius in the days when George the Fourth was king. Her short poems which she published singly or in batches of two or three in sundry perio- dicals were most highly prized, not only by the public but even by Buell critics as Jeffrey and Wilson, until she collected them into volumes, and then they charmed no longer, for their former ad- mirers had become conscious of their mannerism, and of the facti- tious nature of what had seemed to be a genuine poetic inspiration. We have no doubt that these sketches of Turkish life were very successful in their periodical form, but like Mrs. Hemans's poems, they weary in the mass by their mannerism and their elaborate monotony. We are sorry for the author, who must once have been capable of much better things, and might be so again if he could attain to a clear understanding of the dangers as well as the ad- vantages attendant on the great development given of late years to periodical literature. It has been the means of bringing forth from obscurity many young writers whose talents would other- wise have remained unknown to the world and even to themselves ; but its benefits are accompanied by many drawbacks. The worst of these is that it is exceedingly apt to afflict those who court popularity through its means with the literary ailment which the Roman epigrammatist discovered in Matho. An inordinate desire to say everything smartly is a malady most incident to writers in journals that can subsist only by the favour of the multitude, and Mr. Thornburg has caught the infection in one of its severest forms. He has our best wishes for his speedy and complete recovery.

• Turkish Life and Character. By Walter Thombary, Author of "Life in Spain." In two volumes. Published by Smith, Elder, and Co.