26 MARCH 1842, Page 16

MISS PICKERING'S EXPECTANT.

REFERRING to our notice of The Fright* for a generic character of Miss PICKERING as a novelist, we may say that in her present work she preserves her essential mannerism, though she has somewhat changed the form. The male villain is a subordinate person in The Expectant, a female intrigante playing the more influential part in the roguery ; and the melodramatic lord or high aristocrat is very much shaded down, if not altogether got rid of. The same want of general experience of life is visible in her story ; which is constructed with her usual skill for circulating-library purposes and surprises, but perhaps with less regard to the probabilities of life ; the tale in its incidents, as well as its catastrophe, turning on eavesdroppings, doors ajar, deed-findings, and sudden deaths. As a whole, the conduct of the story is less high-flown than in some of her former productions ; but the dialogue strikes us as less easy and natural, and the composition as less finished. To come to particulars, The Expectant scarcely sustains its open- ing promise. At the beginning, we are introduced to two youth- ful collegians, of nearly equal abilities ; but the one poor, indus- trious, high-spirited, and toiling to advance his fortunes in the world ; the other generous, gentlemanly, but indifferent, from the luxury in which he has been lapped and the attention he has re- ceived as the expectant successor to his aunt. To have consistently developed these elements—to have worked out the bracing effects of adversity and exertion upon the mind, and the enervating influ- ences of indulgences and fashionable idleness—and to have shown the withering results of disappointed expectancies even upon the best-constituted mind—would have been to point a moral worthy of a great novelist. But Miss PICKERING'S want of worldly expe- rience would have prevented her from attaining this excellence; and perhaps a greater liking for the startling effects of melodrama than for the quiet truth of nature, might have prevented her from at- tempting it, even had she been more competent to the task. How- ever, after a few chapters in which we have the two friends exhibited with some degree of truth, the story of The Expectant runs off into all the usual effective improbabilities of the Minerva Press : people dying just in the nick of difficulty ; an old man soothed into mar- rying an artful widow, and half-forced half-persuaded into disin- heriting a nephew—who is reduced to poverty to display his hero- ism and exhibit his genius, and who, after his character has been refined by adversity, recovers his fortune more miraculously than he lost it ; love-tales mingling, of course, with all this—on which we may remark, that one of the heroines in The Expectant is a reproduction of the heroine of The Fright. As a circulating-library novel, however, the story of The Ex- pectant is much beyond the general run ; being both more interest- ing and more probable—based on a knowledge of society, if not of life ; and as regards mere composition, beyond all compare. We extract a few passages.

A SPOILED MAN UNDER A DISAPPOINTMENT.

To sleep seemed to him impossible; so, closing the window, he seated himself in an antique chair beside it. And there sat the pampered minion of fortune, fretting, rebelling at his first cross, making it more intolerable by this very re- belling, and deepening the gloom of the present by fearful forebodings of the future; a future which it was not in his power to foresee or control, and which if he even had might to rule, in mates finite folly he might have ruled to his own misery, not happiness. His wealth and amiable disposition had failed to save him from trial. Why not ? They were blessings to be received with thanks, and used carefully by the guidance of God's Spirit, not earnests of an exemption from the lot of sinful man, who needs to pass through much tribula- tion to wean his heart from earth.

He thought not of the many who are born to pain and trouble; who know nothing of the joys of a happy childhood ; who, pinched by poverty and sur- rounded by crime, grow up in squalid wretchedness—their pangs unsoothed by the caresses of fond parents or the thought of a blessed hereafter, where there shall be no more sorrow, no more pain for the trusting and humble. He thought not of the many in the strength of manhood, in the feebleness of age, the sturdy man, the gentle woman, worn down by want and suffering to the brink of the grave, who would have held themselves blest with a tithe of his super- fluities; he thought only of one—and that one himself. Others had been parted from those they loved before, and with a thousandfold less hope of a happy meeting ; but he remembered not this. Sorrow was to him as a strange thing, and he bad not learnt to bear it. We envy those whom we count prosperous : there is many a heavy heart joined to a smiling fortune; or if not so, the thwarting of a moment's wish causes a sharper pang, from the con- trast, to him who enjoys, than the blighting of a life's long hope to him who endures.

• Spectator, No 601; 4th January 1840.

A COUNTY MAN.

The talkative Baronet, by dint of thrusting a finger into every body's pati, had at length succeeded in establishing his right to insert his whole hand into the county pie ; BO that nothing could be done throughout all —shire, from a meeting of the nobility, gentry, and freeholders, down to a meeting of flirts, fiddlers, and dandies, in which Sir Thomas did not usurp the rule. A poacher could not be committed, a burglar tried, a road turned, a rate imposed, an election carried, without his having the greatest art and part in all. Even in cricket-matches he sought to name the two elevens and the umpires, besides bestowing gratis—for nothing—an infinitude of advice touching bats and balls, bowling and fielding, to which said advice, according to him, the cricketing

excellence of shire was solely to be attributed; whilst if a hop were but hinted at, he took upon himself to determine the day, the place, the terms, the musicians ; nay, he would even have drawn out a list of the quadrilles, valses, and galopes, as he did the toasts at the public dinners, had not the dancers and fiddlers rebelled so stoutly against his rule, and laughed so immoderately at his jumbling of tunes and jumbling of names, which his English tongue, as he called it, found quite unpronounceable, that he deemed it most prudent to leave that one matter to the adjustment of others, covering his vexation by a laugh- ing assertion, that the musicians took him for a flat, but he might prove too sharp for them yet. Having had a grandfather who might be talked of, (his great-grandfather was never alluded to,) he counted himself of an ancient family ; and possessing a middling estate, whereon stood a handsome modern mansion, he considered himself, and thanks to his busy meddling and readiness to aid all possessed of rauk or wealth, was considered by many, one of the lead- ing men of the county.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND COLLEGE.

What can a father do? It is the regular thing—the fitting place for a young man of family and fortune : though your son may not acquire a greater know- ledge of the classics for his three years' sojourn there, he may form acquaint- ances and connexions among the nobility and led fing families, which, if he have but the wit to profit by, may insure his advancement in after life. No- thing like interest and a friend at court, or rather friends. Who would send their children to Eton, Rugby, or any other public school, but for the sake of the connexions they form there ? and its being considered a feather in their caps, and marking them as somebodies ? Whitehead ! who is he? inquires some impertinent puppy, with not a hundredth part of this same Whitehead's brains ; and the whole party echo the sneering query. "Oh, Whitehead is a capital fellow ; he was my chum at Eton," answers Lord Booby ; whereupon the sneers are hushed, and the entire circle go the en- tire figure in Whitehead's favour, because he was Lord Booby's chum at Eton. As for the learning the boys get at public schools, it is at the best only like the thin scraping of butter over thick dry bread, such as is given at cheap pre- paratory schools, where little boys are sent who make too much noise at home. But then, there are the friends—the acquaintances, of which, as I said before, a clever lad can make so much. And as for book learning, how does that help a man on in life? No, no, it is knowledge of the world that helps a man for. ward; and I am up to this world and all its ways. Some people go about with one eye shut, but I always keep both wide open.