26 JUNE 1830, Page 16

FIRST LOVE.*

THREE chubby volumes, fat as cherubim upon an altarpiece, form an appropriate emblematic monument of First Love.

This novel is the history of the loves of Edmund and Julia, from the day, nay the hour, of the young lady's birth. Before she was three quarters of an hour old, she smiled in the face of the little Edmund as he held her in his arms, and closed her tiny fingers about his hand: that feeling of kindliness grew into one of tenderness ; and growing with the growth and strengthening with the strength of the infant Julia, it ripened into the young- blooded love of a fine full-grown woman. This history is certainly very prettily told, by an ingenious and yet a gentle-minded female. Its style is elegant; its information that of a lady who well understands her sex,—one of amiable feel- ings, of a religious turn, and of habits and habitual motives such as we are all taught to respect. But what a fertile invention of cross-purposes ! What are we to think of an equivoque of per- haps a thousand pages, elaborate, premeditated, determined ? A hero of a novel of the old Love school as distinguished from the "battle and bustle" school, commonly called the Historical, must be endowed with a nobility and generosity of soul beyond the nature of vulgar man; he must have the bravery of BAYARD, the tenderness of TASSO, the eloquence of OROONDATES, and talk of love in sweeter accents than those of the honey-tongued but broad-shouldered PLATO; but it is a sine qua non that he should be utterly wanting in common sense : he must naturally, of. two obvious conclusions, the one rational the other absurd, take that which makes utterly against his own hopes. Blind to every other interpretation, and driven to despair, he must do precisely those things which lead him away from his object; but then, this must be done in so fine and heroic a style, that every- body must feel a sympathy in his misfortunes—must admire his character, deplore his mistakes, and hope that some light from heaven may break upon him and show in what a miserable cul de

* First Love. A Novel.L3 vols. London, 1830.

sac he is groping. The it of the lady-novelist is the fabrica- tion of cross-purposes : by the middle of the third volume, the weaver has got her criss-cross threads into such a knot, that she gives up her web in despair, and, looking up to heaven, calls for supernatural aid : immediately her page is filled with wonders, prodigies, and gods, and the Gordian knot is cut by this sort of hocus poems. Forty or fifty pages then serve to arrange the whole affair : the dead are restored to life, the wicked are hanged or otherwise disposed of, and the lovers rush into each other's arms in an ecstasy of rapture; and then, master and man, mistress and maid, troop off to the altar in couples, like so many beagles. In this history, a little beggar boy is found by the road-side : he is taken into the house of a lady of rank, educated, and made a sailor : he becomes a naval hero, and the newspaper columns are filled with his exploits. In the mean time, he falls in love with his protectress's daughter, a girl of title and rank. The

children having been brought up together, scarcely know whe-

ther they are brother and sister or lovers. The youth has honour enough not to make love outright, though he takes care not to be mistaken ; and the lady is described as ready to make any sacri- fice. Luckily it is discovered that the beggar boy is the son Of a lord. It might have been thought that now the course was clear, but then there is a volume to fill : and the lovers still proceed misunderstanding one another, to such a degree, that any persons of this world would have finished the business and parted ; but the authoress knew she had a contrivance in pickle to set the whole right. All of a sudden, a chest is found, with a false bottom ; a Jew is overturned en route ; a lord happens to be passing—he picks up some forged letters, which solve several enigmas, and a cloud of mischief is dispersed by a case of jewels and a dressing-box. The hook has sufficient value to entitle it to a specimen. There is in truth much in it that we approve, for its right views, its pleasing style, and sometimes for its dramatic force. The passage we are about to quote shows in what way a child may be educated for a young devil. It is true that parents seem to understand this secret tolerably well, and succeed perfectly in the rearing of imps ; but it is possible that when the odious picture is set before them, they may avoid the resemblance of it.

HOW TO TRAIN A CHILD IN THE WAY HE SHOULD NOT GO.

" Henry, at this time, promised to have in him a strange mixture of thadisprisitions both of his-father and mother ; or, in other words, of evil and good. The evil certainly did predominate ; yet, had a careful hand early separated the seeds, cultivated the good and cast out the bad, this ill- fated child might have been saved from perdition ; or had he, with all his faults, been supplied with that only unerring standard of right, the prac- tical application of sacred truths to moral obligations, even in after-life there might have been hope ; but his father, as we have said, had no reli- gion: he daily scoffed at whatever was most sacred, purposely to insult the feelings of his wife, and this before his child. One morning, he found Maria with the Bible before her, and Henry on' her knee. He looked at them for a moment ; then taking the child by the shoulder, he raised one foot level with the hand in which he held him, and kicked him in a contemptuous manner, as he swung him to the middle of the floor, saying, that such a mammy's brat ought to have been a girl. Mrs. St. Aubin ran to raise the child from the ground. St. Aubin snatched up the sacred volume, open as it lay, and flung; it after her, telling her, in a voice of thunder, that she was a psalm-singing fool, and ordering her not to cram the boy's head with any of her cursed nonsense. Indeed, in his calmest and hest disposed moods, 'You are a fool, Mrs. St. Aubin was his usual remark on any thing his wife ventured to say or do. " Mrs. St. Aubin having ascertained that the child was not hurt, took up the book, arranged its ruffled leaves in silence, and laid it with reverence on the table. Her husband viewed her with a malicious grin till her task was completed ; then, walking up to the table, he opened the treasury of sacred knowledge, and deliberately tore out every leaf, flinging them, now on one side, now on the other, to each far corner of the apartment ; then striding towards the fire-place, he planted himself on the hearth, with his back to the chimney, his legs spread in the attitude of a colossal statue, the tails of his coat turned apart under his arms, and his hands in his side pockets. "'Now,' he said, looking at his wife, pick them up !—pick them up I —pick them up I ' he continued, till all were collected.

" Mrs. St. Aubin was about to place the sheets within their vacant cover on the table; but, with a stamp of his foot, which made every article of furniture in the room shake, and brought a picture that hung against the wall, on its face to the floor, he commanded her to put them in the fire. She hesitated; when, seizing her arm, he shook it over the flames, till the paper taking fire, she was compelled to loose her hold.

" I ought to have reserved a sheet to have made a fool's cap for you, I think,' he said, perceiving that silent tears were following each other

down the cheeks of his wife. 'Why, what an idiot you are 1 the child has more sense than you have,' he added, seeing that Henry, occupied by surprise and curiosity, was not crying. Come, Henry,' he continued, in a voice for him most condescending, 'you shall carry my fishing-basket to-day.,

"Henry had been just going to pity his poor mamma when he saw her crying ; but hearing his father say that he had more sense than his mother, he could not help feeling raised in his own estimation, and anx- ious to show his sense by flying with peculiar alacrity for the basket. "He had viewed the whole of the preceding scene with but little com- prehension, as may be supposed, of its meaning, and with very confused ideas of right and wrong, being, at the time, not above six years old; but the practical lesson—and there are no lessons like practical lessons—made an indelible impression ; all future efforts, whether of mother or aunt, usher or schoolmaster, layman or divine, to infuse into Henry precepts derived from a source he had seen so contemned by his father, were for ever vain. His father, he was old enough to perceive, was feared and obeyed by every one within the small sphere of his observation: for him, therefore, he felt a sort of spurious deference, though he could not love him. For his mother, who had always indulged him with the too great tenderness of a gentle spirit utterly broken, and who had wept over him many a silent hour, till his little heart was saddened without his knowing

why, he naturally felt some affection ; but then he daily saw her treated with indignity, and therefore did not respect either her or her lessons: for he was just at the age when a quick child judges wrong, a dull one not

at all. . "Henry had much of the violence of his father's temper, with some of the fearfulness of his mother's. Injudicious hands, the latter, though no virtue, might have been made to assist in correcting the former ; the whole current of his fears might have been turned into a useful channel : in short, he might have been taught to fear only doing wrong, and, by a strict administration of justice, proving to him his perfect security from blame while he did right, he might have been given all that honest. hearted boldness in a good cause, which, throughout after-life, is so ne- cessary to ensure dignity to the character of man, and the early promises of which, it is so delightful to see in the happy open countenance, in the very step and air of a fine frank boy, who has never had his spirit broken by undeserved harshness, or been rendered hopeless of pleasing by in- consistency.

"Henry, on the contrary, when be had done no real wrong, was fre- quently treated with the most violent cruelty ; while his very worse faults passed unreproved, if they did not happen to cross the whims of his fa- ther: and this cruelty, thus inflicted on a helpless, powerless child, which could not resist, for ever raised in the breast of Henry, who was, as we have said, naturally violent, an ever unsatisfied thirst of vengeance ; a sense, too, of the injustice of the punishments inflicted, a thing early un- derstood by children, embittered his feelings, and the transient impres- sions thus rendered permanent, corroded inwardly, till they settled into a malice of nature, totally subversive of all that was or might have been good or amiable."