MRS. GORE'S PEERS AND PARVENUS.

IT is probable that history is a more certain line of business for the ma- nufacturer of fictions than every-day nature, provided the dealer have imagination enough to vivify the borrowed wares so that they may pass muster in the market. The historical romance writer has a wide field open to him, even if be confine himself to an epoch whose manners and opinions have the same generic character,—as from the accession of James the First to the American and French Revolutions. Besides this inherent variety, derived from the manners and habits of the particular age, public events and public characters may vary the interest of the historical romance; it also admits of more contrast in the persons and of adventure in the incidents. No doubt, a good fiction of the day is better than an historical romance of a similar grade, by its greater freshness and truth: but a good fiction cannot be produced once a year or " oftener if needit be" on a subject which is essentially the same,—exclusive fashionables, with the vices and bickered polish of a highly artificial state ; the coarse- ness, weakness, and overdone finery of the newly rich, with their fashion- able aspirations ; and occasional notices of some of the external peculiari- ties of county or professional "gentry." Mrs. Gore's later works have ranked in this category ; which has necessarily generated a repetition of herself, though she has struggled what she could against it ; seizing upon the latest " tragic incident" or " striking occurrence "—duelling, the effects of scandal, mercantile swindling, and what not—" to point a moral or adorn a tale." But the decline and fall has progressively gone on, till it seems to have reached its lowest deep in Peers and Parvenus ; where the main incidents and persons are grossly improbable, and the manners little more than a repro-

&lotion. The double groups of "Peers" and "Parvenus" would seem to berepresented by two sisters. One of them marries a profligate peer, who takes to the turf, neglects his family, and reaps a reward in the undutiful conduct of his son : the other sister's husband is Mr. Clutterbuck, a wealthy citizen ; and the writer seems to have designed some sort of effect by the rivalry of the two families ; but not much comes of it. The real hero of the book is Jervis Cleve. The son of a labourer, he passed his sickly childhood as a weeder ; but, having been placed in a foundation- school, he so distinguishes himself in " laming" as to be sent to college and to tarn out a kind of Admirable Crichton. Young Cleve had nourished a childish passion for the daughter of his patroness when employed in weeding her garden : this passion has grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength ; and, coupled with the pain of his position through the want of sympathy between his own mind and that of his family, it carries him to Italy, on a travelling fellowship. To Italy also go most of the dramatis persona; ; and among them his quondam patroness, Mrs. Heeksworth and family. Her eldest daughter has now become an heiress ; and she was always, it seems, in love with the little, sickly, dirty boy, who used to weed in her mother's garden. How this mutual but un- known passion might have terminated, it is difficult to say ; but Cleve is beset by his elder brother. This " ne'er-do-weel" had been committed for poaching in early youth ; then took to various petty offences ; rose gradually to higher crime ; went to America, where he became a pirate, murderer, and gambler ; and in the novel figures as an American Colonel Cleveland. Although a ruffian without education, he mixes with lords and ladies, and in fact serves the purpose of one of the gods of the ancient mythology. He induces a pattern young lord, quite a John Manners but with more sense, to gamble, and elope with his mistress, who has passed for Mrs. Cleveland. Hating his brother without any sufficient reason, he puts the gallantry upon poor Jervis : and in short, the whole of this person, and everything connected with him, resemble those dramas of half genteel villany which Yates introduced at the Adelphi Theatre some twenty years ago, though we doubt whether even an Adelphi audience would stomach their exagge- ration in Peers and Parvenus. Finally, the elder Cleve gets hanged ; Lucy Hecksworth dies ; and Jervis "assumes, in the strict seclusion of college life, the death-in-life asceticism of the cloister." Peers and Parvenus is said to have a moral; but we cannot find it, unless it be that amiable young dukes and lords should not strike up aniatimate friendship with low ruffians, or young ladies fall in love with juvenile weeders,—things of such rare occurrence as not to require three Volumes to warn people against them. There are some good observa- tions on literary and scientific men mixing in fashionable society; but with no bearing upon the action of the novel, or its moral either. Cleve does not intrude himself—he is forced into royal connexions and high life at Naples ; and he is not a parvenu—which is a ammeter, not a condition. Chatham was not a parvenu, though he had a touch of the mountebank; Johnson and Porson were not parvenus ; nor were Eldon and Tenterden, though lawyers nearly as eminent and Sprung from an origin as humble might be pointed out who are ; War- ren Hastings was no parvenu, but Paul Benfield and many other nabobs were. A mixture of bad taste, pushing truckling servility, and full- blown insolence, constitutes the parvenu ; and instinct should have taught these characteristics to Mrs. Gore.

The last thing that leaves us is style—the manner in which we habitu- ally give forms to substance, or what should be substance. The ruined emigre, with scarcely means for a meal, wore his scanty and threadbare wardrobe in the style and carried himself with the air that distinguished the old noblesse in their glory at Versailles. '

"Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage:" '

bu; although the voice is broken, and the strength failing, and the spirit evaporated, the manner remains, suggestive of the past. So it is with clever Mrs. Gore : her easy, buoyant, smart, and life-breathing style, though now rather the result of habit than the reflection of a mind, carries the reader easily if not always pleasantly over flats and among absurdities. The persons are mostly old friends with new faces, or rather new names : the polished insolence and heartless indifference of George Joddrell and his set are mere repetitions of the Hamilton; not out of place under the reign of George the Fourth, but scarcely in keeping with Victoria. The common sense, and regular but confined views of Mrs. Hecksworth—who can only see in the distinguished Jervis Cleve the boy who was indebted to her charity—though very well-executed, reminds us of Mrs. Armytage varied. The dialogues about fashionable life lead to nothing, and tell nothing new. The privations of the peasantry, and the effects of imprisonment for trifles, with the conversion of George Joddrell's mater- nal grandfather, are seen to be tributes to the spirit of cant ; but they are floated by the vivacious style and the manner of society that distinguish Mrs. Gore, and which almost float Colonel Cleveland, at least while he is kept in a subordinate position. There are also scattered remarks, which though tainted by a cynico-parasitical spirit, have the force of truth derived from observation.

The following has been served up before; and Juvenal did not exagger- ate when he declared one mightily beyond the Saimatians and the Frozen Ocean to escape from canting claptrap : but it may be taken as a favour- able specimen of composition ; and it gives an insight into the persons and position of the Peerage part of the story.

" Still, there was something in George that even [his uncle] Clntterbuck him self; the sturdy uncompromising monied man, could not treat with personal slight. The edge of the glittering article of fashionable hard-ware was too keen to be trifled with. The substance might not be deep, but the surface was polished into a mirror that reflected the defects and peculianties of others so vividly as to make them turn away abashed. Insolently satirical, the easy assurance of his sarcasms did but increase their bitterness. Not a person upon earth of whom he stood in awe! It is an afflicting result of the misconduct provoking the contempt of children towards their parents, that the first great duty of filial respect being in- ved- , no after-deference can be called into existence. Nature provides, for the order of society, that unlimited veneration shall be testified by the child to parents; and the child who has once felt itself superior to the author of its being, feels thenceforward superior to all the world I After des g his father

and mother, a man will scarcely even fear God' or 'honour the King.'

" This contempt of all things, human and divine, was an evil which tile Ilil- lingdons themselves had entailed upon their son. It was not in the nature of things for the young man to look up with reverence to the gambler and horse- jockey, whose soul was engrossed by his club and stud; a man whose word was disputed by all whose incredulity was beneath the convincing arguments of a

i

duelling-pistol; and whose embarrassments he heard sneered at in places of resort where father and son should never meet or be named together!"

Here is George again, in a sort of continuation.

"So, girls ! .you have thrown over your dragon, eh?" said George, stretching himself luxuriously on the sofa of his sisters' morning-room, the day after his arrival on a visit to Lady Hillingdon, immediately after his rustication at Oxford:

" Mrs. Fairfax left us at Christmas," replied Agatha.

"And high time, too! I fancy the governor would have cashiered her years ago, had it been convenient to book up her arrears. Who ever heard of a girl of nineteen in leading-strings ! And you know, Mary, you are nineteen. You can't deceive one."

" You deceive yourself; brother; I am twenty—a year younger than yourself."

" True; I shall be of age in June. Who knows it better than I, except.perhaps the governor, who wants me to help him to square his accounts by cheating my- self of my birthright." "And shall you assist my father?" inquired Agatha; who, since the departure of Mrs. Fairfax, had heard of little else from her mother but her father's em- barrassments, and the impending ruin of the family. " I shall assist myself. There is no way, I fancy, of getting mg debts paid but helping the old boy to pay off his own. For though mine amount to hun- dreds where he will have to book up thousands, it would be the deuce of a thing, you know, to crush my own credit my first season in town. So, to clear off old scores and commence new ones, I shall give a lift to Lord Hillingdon." " Thank Heaven !" ejaculated Mary; who had been grieving bitterly over the intelligence of her father's humiliations, tauntingly communicated by his wife. " But I can tell him, 'twill be the last time," added George. "The Hillingdon rent-roll will be as mach reduced as I can afford to let him reduce it. That is the worst, you see, of having a father of forty-two, when one comes to be one-and- twenty. Lord Hillingdon has five-and-twenty years of folly before him; whereas it would particularly suit my book to monopolize on my own account (now I am come to years of discretion) the extravagance of-the family." " In order that at forty-two your son may call you the old boy,' and talk of you as an object of charity?" remonstrated his sister. "No, Miss Mary!" said George, raising his handsome face from the sofa- cushion on which he was lounging, and turning it with a smile towards his prosy sister; " I never intend to have a son. I am too poor to marry for love—too proud to marry for money—and too much attached to myself to throw miykself, away. By the way, I must tell you something supereminently capital. Those Clutterbuck people found me out last week, during the two days I spent in town on my way from Hillingdon hither, and insisted on my dining with them. Con- ceive that stupid woman Joddrelling' me the other night at the opera, while waiting for her carriage, as if afraid that any one in London should remain ig norant of the relationship between us."

" And why should they?" quietly interposed Agatha.

"You will understand better when you-have passed a season in town! I doubt whether my mother will even allow you to visit her sister—at least, I shall strongly advise her against it."