Public Men and Pretty Women. By Flora Dawson. Two volumes.
(Richard Bentley.)—This is a very clever book. The object of the fair writer clearly is to show how very amusing a work may be made by making it perfectly silly. This design is carried out from first to last with perfect consistency, and there is scarcely a page without some absurd turn of expression which elicits from the reader a hearty laugh. Indeed so well is the object accomplished that we shall not be surprised to hear that many people have been deceived by this accomplished quizzer and have taken her compositions seriously. Yet tho preface ought to have warned them. "I desire it to be distinctly understood," says Mrs. Dawson, "that every circumstance and every character have been drawn from memory, and not from imagination." And then in the very first story she tolls us of a Miss de Courval who travelled to Italy with the lining of her carriage stuffed with despatches from Napoleon to Murat, and how Murat received her in the courtyard, and what he said and what Miss de Courval said, and what the aide-de-camp said, also how the Court pages soaped Murat's private staircase and how he slipped down, and what he said, and what they said—on which occasions Mrs. Dawson does not pretend to have been present, and therefore cannot be speaking from memory. Neither is it possible that a lady should have "discarded all imaginary and worked-up adventures," when she writes of two cases in which barristers concealed their marriages to prevent the injury which an early union always works on a lawyer's professional prospects ; and, again, of an uncle who wanted to marry his niece and ward in order to get possession of her fortune, such a marriage being obviously void and giving him no title to it whatever ; and again, how the uncle failing to induce his niece to marry him murdered her, and being discovered wont raving mad, for obviously he must have been tried for murder and acquitted on the ground of insanity, and such an affair happening within the memory of living woman to persons of wealth and station would have been a cause alebre such as every one would have heard of. We must say, however, that a preface of this sort carries the joke too far, for there is often no absurdity in the incidents themselves, but merely in the way of tolling them, and often no absurdity at all except in the utter triviality of the incident narrated. People expect a hoax which is carried out with such perfect skill to be dropped in the preface.
Waiving, however, the morality of Mrs. Dawson's book, the art displayed is remarkable. The affectation, folly, inflated verbiage, and triviality are quite perfect, and yet never overdone. One can laugh at the authoress from the first page to the last.
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