ANTONY THE DEAF AND DUMB BOY.
To some readers there will seem more freshness in the substance of this novel than it really possesses, because its elements are drawn from a class of works, if works they can be called,. which are now forgotten. Time was, in the palmy; days of the melodrama, when some bodily infirmity was the source of inte- rest and the origin of action ; when the audience were called upon to sympathize with the blind boy or the dumb girl—to applaud the "sentiments " the affliction evoked from some father, mother, brother, sister, friend—and to thrill at the " situation," which in persons with the common faculties would have been no situation at all. The melodreanatio playwrights generally laid their scene in some distant time or foreign country, and some piece of rather felonious villany mostly produced the theatrical distress. The novels of the same sera—some half a century bygone—amply sup- plied improbabilities in conduct or incident, where the story was laid amid the everyday scenes of common life. Physical impossi- bilities might be a recognized obstacle to the circulating library • *Antony the Deaf and Dumb Boy. In two volumes. Pablished by Bentley.
fictionists of those days, but the moral or social scarcely stood in their way.
Antony the Deaf and Dumb Boy is a pleasant combination of these two schools, with a dash of foreign highflown sentiment, which with many passes for poetry, and the mind and manners of the present day. There is the " interest " arising from a deaf and almost dumb youth of high aspirations and genial feeling, at first surrounded by vulgar uncongenial persons, who, taking no trouble with him, report him half-witted. In the next stage, there is the youth awakened by the influence of friendship sad love to the hopes of life, and to the prospect of distinction to be won by struggle both with himself and circumstances. The means that serve to develop these ideas are—a village fire, where Master Antony plays the hero ; a trial for incendiarism, where, u a witness at the eleventh hour, he appears on the scene to save the innocent and confound the guilty ; a diary, where the -writer attempts the difficult task of tracing the feelings of a youth with such a character as we have described, rendered deaf by illness in childhood, and losing the habit of speech because no one takes the trouble to talk to him; an attachment for a girl far above An- tony's position, though not his birth; his struggles and success as an author; his advancement as a diplomatist ; and finally, his cure, the discovery of a rich uncle, who has watched over him as a friend, and of course his marriage.
The general plan argues invention ; but the working out of the idea is marred by the want of a sufficient knowledge of life to pre- vent the writer from falling into gross unlikelihood in the cond.uot of the story; a defect not in this case counteracted by skill in narra- tion, which can sometimes make the unlikely seem real by the way in which it is presented. In spite of these drawbacks, the story has some of that lazy interest which induced Gray to couple new novels tehd lying on a sofa as a kind of elysium.
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