Gold and Tinsel. By the Author of "The Ups and
Downs of an Old Maid's Life." 3 vols. (Tinsley.)—We expected a good novel from a writer who has done such a very bright and truthful piece of character- painting as "The Ups and Downs of an Old Maid's Life," and must frankly say that we have been disappointed. The story is but of very slender interest; the characters, with one or two exceptions, wanting in originality and life. The profligate young man of fashion who stands for the "tinsel," the virtuous man of business in whom we recognize the "gold," the worldly dean and his more worldly wife, the haughty baronet and his spinster aunt hanging on to the vanities of life with the grasp of her last strength, are personages whom we have met before, and whom we do not see touched with any novelty of treatment. The best part of the book is the account of the election in the cathedral city of Discombo ; the best, we say, because it describes, as is easy to see, actual experience, though on the score of art and literary taste we object to it. That Con- servatives bribe and intimidate, that Liberals do not condescend to use quite so much of corruption or terror, is possibly true ; we certainly think that the balance of wrong-doing in these matters inclines to the party who have the greater command of wealth and social influence ; but then those "new" rich men who embrace party-views at all only as means of success, and who are the most corrupt of all, too often embrace Liberal views. Anyhow, we do not care to see reckless party-
views expressed in a novel, and expressed, as mast necessarily be the case, with an aggravating assumption. Such writing neither instructs nor amuses, and a novel has no other raison d'être. The sketch of the Dean, with his decorous dullness, is no more than a fair reprisal for the very unlovely portraits of Dissenting ministers with which novelists so commonly present us, though the way in which he bullies a junior canon (ii., 117) is utterly impossible in a gentleman ; and the marriage of the beautiful heroine, or rather second heroine, in a Baptist chapel is a step to the social equality of which our Noncon- formist friends think themselves wrongfully deprived. We note a very decided statement, coinciding with what has often been said in those columns, of the contempt of political principle and greed of money shown by women. We should not omit to praise a sketch of some humour of Miss Stuart Lindsay, who, owing to her ambiguous name, gets herself inscribed on the list of voters, and exercises her privilege accordingly.
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