THE BANKER'S WIFE, OR COURT AND CITY.

Tan title seems rather concocted with an eye to the buyer than founded upon the matter of the book. There is nothing whatever to do with the "Court" in the novel, and very little with the "City," especially in the sense in which it will be understood ; whilst the "Banker's Wife," though an amiable and excellent person, is by no means a prominent character in the fiction, and contributes no- thing to the conduct of the story or its denouement. The mis- chiefs and misery arising from commercial swindling upon a magni- ficent scale, and from the "privileged assassination" of the duel, are Mrs. GORE'S principal subjects in The Banker's Wife. She has also aimed at showing the bad domestic effects resulting from the engrossing claims of English business habits: but in this she has failed, because the case of a man with the consciousness of forgery and embezzlement hanging over his head must be a rare, not a general occurrence.

The banking part of the story of The Banker's Wife is this. Richard Haml3n has succeeded to an embarrassed firm : to save his father's credit, and to refute the sarcasm of a lordly neigh- bour who predicted that the new house of Dean Park would have to be pulled down, he carries on the business by misappropriationa and forgeries, which resemble those of FatisTrautor rather than any thing else. Unlike FAUNTLEROY or ROWLAND STEPHENSON, how- ever, Richard Hamlyn is a pattern man—regular, religious, cha- ritable, and exemplary in all family relations, excepting that hia formalism and cold tyranny extinguish domestic freedom and attachment. He is also a senator and public character ; receiving ministers of state at his dinner-parties, heading meetings for public purposes, and looked up to by the monied interests as their repre- sentative in the House of Commons. In an evil hour, Hamlyn has consented to apostatize on a great commercial question, in order to procure a consulship for a clerk who has become suspicious of the state of the firm : his change is treated nith derision by the House, and fiercely assailed by one of its " wits" ; a personal quarrel follows ; Hamlyn is mortally wounded ; the banking-house stops; and his family would have been reduced to almost beggary but for some circumstances not likely to have happened, and prin- cipally the marriage of L3 dia Ham13 n to the Marquis of Dartford, the preliminaries of which form a portion of the story. The social and ethical parts of The Banker's 1Vife, so far as Mrs. GORE comprehends ethics, relate to the jealousy of Hamlyn and his eldest son towards their supercilious neighbour Lord Vernon, and the reception among different grades of fashionables of an old East India Colonel Hamilton, a client of Hamlyn, and to whom the banker is playing the part of legacy-hunter. There is also a daughter-in-law of Colonel Hamilton ; whose story and attachment to Hamlyn's second son form the nearest approach to romance in the volumes

When high excellence has been attained in any pursuit, there always coexists with it a mechanical power, or more properly the power of exhibiting all the forms of art, irrespective of the

character of the matter worked upon. A musician can extemporize upon any theme ; a sculptor can form an attractive figure or group from clay or new bread ; an orator can speak off a speech ; and even a poet, if he pleases to exercise his faculty, can write oc- casional verses all but impromptu for an album : the mechanical facility arising from habitual exercise supplying the form, whilst the design and material are the repetition of old matter, or of ideas previously rejected as superfluous or unusable. In something of this kind the character of The Banker's Wife consists,—" another, yet the same." The character of Hamlyn is not like that of Mr. Barnesley in Stokes/sill Place or the Man of Business; but the techy jealousy of the new country gentleman respecting the superciliousness of the family aristocracy is a counterpart. The same may be said of the superiority of the very high nobility to fashionable prejudices, in their just estimation of the cordial open-hearted Colonel Hamilton, whom the second-rate fashionables despise for his bluntness and ignorance of particular forms ; a feeling which has been already exhibited by Mrs. Goan, and more than once. The duel has also been used by this au- thoress twice before as influencing the catastrophe; just as com- mercial loss and death in consequence are the means of dis- tress in Stokes/sill Place, as they are in The Banker's Wife, and perhaps with about as much consistency in business usages and probability. The fact is, the saloon and the boudoir are Mrs. GORE'S ground : when she quits them, either for passion or the sterner struggles and realities of life, she is somewhat to seek. She seizes upon actual occurrences with considerable tact, turns them to her purposes with much skill, and narrates them with an easy and almost lifelike fluency ; but, closely ex- amined, they are not homogeneous, and a curious eye can detect each piece of the mosaic and tell whence it was taken. It may also be observed—and perhaps this may account for Mrs. GORE'S want of popularity—that she is seldom broad and general. With COOPER, though the characters are individual, and the incidents specially adapted to effect the object for which they are introduced, yet both persons and incidents represent a class. In the case of Mrs. GORE, the general is too often sunk to the particular : although she aims at exhibiting some general rule, it is very often only an ex- ception, unless in the case of fashionable characters, who, sooth to say, "have no characters at all."

In despite of all this, The Banker's Wife is a very clever, and

what is more, a very readable novel; clear, rapid, fluent, abound- ing in pointed sentences, claptrap remark, and admirable sketches of manners ; though the critical eye will often recognize much that it has seen before. Perhaps a new topic is

THE SEAT OF OLD NOBILITY.

There was something in the solid but noble simplicity of the house that en-

chanted Colonel Hamilton. Ormeau exhibited neither the imposing historical dignity of the Hyde nor the modern elegance of Dean Park and the Manor. It was a vast commodious mansion, built by Inigo Jones, and furnished half a century ago with a degree of state and richness precluding all interference with, its arrangements, till, at the close of another half century or so, and another growth and fall of timber, sentenced to be furnished again. There were no nicknacks, no modern prettinesses, no fashionable fauteuils at Ormeau. The huge Nankin vases on the pier-tables had probably been bought in Queen Anne's time at the New Exchange or India House; the rich Japan screens, at the toy-shop of Mrs. Chenevix. The last portrait of the family collection was the present Duke, when a boy, by Hoppner. Not so much as one of the graceful and emasculate pictures of Lawrence to connect the square roomy simplicity of Ormeau with the flimsy elegances of the day. The Hutches. deposited her crotchet-work, every night, in the huge, old-fashioned, Tonbridge- ware work-box presented to her by the Duke on the birth of one of her children twenty years before ; and, by way of writing-desk, a little inlaid ebony letter- case, which she had used as a bride, still served her correspondence with her grandchildren.

The same stand-still order of things pervaded all the habits and connexions of the house. The Duke and Dutcbess of Elvaston stood too substantially in the world to veer about with every wind of doctrine. The people with whons they had associated in their youth were their associates in their age. They- used the same tradespeople, and entertained the same friends. No running- after new systems or patent inventions. Happy, respectable, dignified, they desired no changes save such as were forced upon them by the progressive spirit of the times. A totally different view of the business of life held good among these people,

and among the Versions. The Elvastons conceived themselves to live at Or- mean, and looked upon London as a place of pastime ; whereas the family at the Hyde regarded the country as a place reluctantly endured during the in- tervals of glorious London. Much of this arose from the circumstance that

the Elvastons were not court-haunters—that they bad no rank to intrigue for, no daughter to marry. Their chief pleasure in life consisted in that princely hospitality which affects no display, but knows no intermission. Ormeau was literally what is called an "open house." For months, nay, years together, the family never sat down to dinner alone. As to the hounds, in which the Duke was supposed to take such intense delight, and which had obtained an almost proverbial name in England, they were, in fact, merely an item in the amusements he felt bound to provide for his friends and neighbours. Impos- sible for a man to have a more kindly or sociable idea of the duties connected with the rank and fortune assigned him by inheritance. Nevertheless, the service of plate on his Grace's table was whai Lord Vernon would have considered old-fashioned and mean. There was no splendid dessus de table, as at the Hyde; no effigies of ancestors on war-horses in gold or gilt plate; nor any of the little table fopperies dear to the systematic dinner-givers of the day. The sideboard of the very Hamlyn's was more showy ; for the phrase "living in good style" would have passed for a sad vulgarism at Orrnean.

MISTAKE OF A FASHIONABLE PARVENU.

To live in the world without the faculty of observation, advances a man no further in tact than to spend his days at Ghazerapore; and poor Walter, though established in the coteries of fashionable life, understood quite as little of their impulses as the simple-hearted object of his contempt. With the noble guests who in the course of the day assembled at Dean Park, Colonel Hamilton had the greatest success. So far from being shocked at his bluntness, the Rother- woods were inexpressibly amused by the sallies of a person so untrammelled by the monotonizing influences of fashionable Fife. As something exceedingly new to them, be was exceedingly welcome ; and his pungent criticisms upon the follies of the day were applauded by involuntary bursts of merriment, such as had never before echoed under the stuccoed ceilings of Dean Park.

Lord Crawley, on the other band, a man who had set up for statesmanship on a shallow stock of reading and information, and whose knowledge consisted of facts ably abstracted from the experience of others, contrived, in the course of their first day's gossip, to extract a world of information from the Colonel touching the seat of war in India and the state of public opinion in the East. While Walter Hamlyn was endeavouring to cover, by dexterous maneeueree, the quizzicalities of the old-fashioned Nabob's method of taking wine at dinner and dealing at whist—peculiarities of no moment in the eyes of people of the world—Lord Crawley and his noble brother-in-law were chiefly anxious that the trifling young man they tolerated as their banker's son should hold his peace, that they might give their attention to the amusing anecdotes of the veteran.

Even Mrs. Hamlyn, though far superior to the weakness of blushing for a homely guest because she happened to have great personages under her roof, had been a little apprehensive that the Oriental anecdotes, so often repeated at Dean Park, might prove as tedious to her visiters as to herself. "Afraid I shall be tired of listening to Colonel Hamilton's amusing Indian stories! " exclaimed Lady Rotherwood, to whom she expressed her appre- hensions : "are you in earnest ? Why, I never heard any thing so interesting in my life. 'What an agreeable, chatty old man ! and how much of the world he has seen ! "

Mrs. Hamlyn, accustomed in her own family to Lear Colonel Hamilton's oddities attributed to having seen nothing of "the world," could scarcely refrain from a smile. The good-natured Countess's interpretation of the word was clearly that of the Statistical Society rather than of Almack's ! "It is like reading an amusing book, to talk to Colonel Hamilton," per- sisted Lady Rotherwood : "I literally held any breath, last night, when he was giving us that charming account of the lion-hunt at Chinderabad !" Sophia, who had been listening three times a week to this very narrative for the last six months, as one of the Colonel's crack stories, and been debarred by politeness only from interrupting what she feared must form a disagreeable obstacle to the political discussions of the Parliamentary men present, recog- nized her own misconception. It had not before struck her that the eminence of Lady Rotherwood's position in life rendered a thousand things new and strange to her which constituted the stale daily bread of Cavendish Square and Dean Park. Refined to inanity in her habits of life, the excitement afforded by the hairbreadth 'scope inventions of a novelist, or the stirring anecdotes of a pilgrim in the wilderness, such as Colonel Hamilton, was an agreeable relief to the ennui of the languid Countess. "When my nephew joins us," she observed, on the eve of Lord Dartford's arrival, "I entreat you, my dear Mrs. Hamlyn, to get that dear old man once more into the Gbaznapore chapter. Dartford has not heard the stories of the lion-hunt, or the Natch-girl, or the serpent-charmer, and will be absolutely enchanted. Captain Hamlyn ! pray promise me the lion-hoot for your friend Dartford. My nephew is such an enthusiastic sportsman ! My nephew will delight in your lively, chatty, old neighbour!" Thus encouraged, Colonel Hamilton became the star of the little party ; and the enthusiasm of his auditory seemed to develop a thousand new or for- gotten sources of information. Beset by the young Marquis with inquiries concerning the wild sports of the East—by Lord Crawley, touching its tri- bunals and institutions—by the Countess, regarding its climate, fruits, and flowers, its suttees and incantations—his replies were so fluent and so varied, that Walter Hamlyn had the mortification of finding the evening pass away without a single allusion to London politics or fashionable scandal, in which he fancied himself qualified to take a distinguished part. Further consideration satisfied him, that, since it was his object to render his father's house agreeable to the society prized by the London banker only as conferring importance upon Dean Park in the eyes of the county, and enabling him to make a stand against the impertinence of the Vernon's, they might consider themselves lucky that, while following up their system of courtesy to the Nabob, they had unconsciously engaged for the amusement of their friends a first-rate conversation man.

The closing scenes, consequent upon the danger and death of Hamlyn and the ruin of the banking-house, afford more scope for Mrs. GORE to display, not passion perhaps, but something like it, than we have lately met with in her writings. The following scene takes place after the close of a business consultation in which it is decided that the house must stop.

"The poor old porter was sobbing helpless behind the door as they passed. The aspect of the despairing countenances and ferocious eyes that met Colonel Hamilton's view in the throng without, as the policeman assisted them into their hackney-coach, had not faded from his recollection, even when, after a slow return towards the West-end, they reached the inauspicious purlieus of Cavendish Square. "On entering the coach, the old man had taken the arm of the unresisting Henry under his, and kept his hand fondly clasped within his own, till they approached together the 'house no more his home.' Not a token of conscious- ness or recognition escaped the bract-broken young man! Colonel Hamilton was forced to assist him from the coach, as he would have assisted the helpless- ness of a child.

"So thoroughly absorbed was be, indeed, by the alarming state of exhaustion of his young friend, and so bewildered by the exciting scenes which had been passing before his eyes, that he took no note of the aspect of the servants who met him on the door-steps. Even when Johnston addressed him in the hall, the deplorable condition of the fine young fellow leaning upon his arm was more to the Colonel than any tidings he could have to learn of improvement in the wounded man.

"He led him into the study, as though the house were his own and poor Harry a visiter, and placed him silently on the sofa. At that moment, Mrs. Hamilton, who had been watching anxiously for their arrival, in the earnestness of her desire to see them ere they went up stairs, hurried into the room. "On perceiving Colonel Hamilton leaning over the half-fainting Henry, she beckoned him towards her, and would have fain spoken. But the kind old soul, whose eyes were obscured by gathering tears, forestalled the question he fancied her about to ask.

" Yes ! all is over, Nell). !' said he. 'The house has stopped payment. Go to him ! Say a kind word to him. The poor fellow has no longer a guinea in the world—' "Ere he could add another syllable, Ellen was beside the scarcely conscious young man—taking his hands into hers, pressing them to her lips, her eyes, rather with the wild tenderness of a mother who finds a lost child restored to her, than the shamefacedness of a mistress or sober affection of a wife. "'Mine for ever !'—whispered she, with streaming eyes, as she pressed him

to her heart. Ours for ever ! ' she repeated, turning towards Colonel Hamil- ton, who had advanced towards them, and was contemplating with deep feeling the fervent nature betrayed at such a moment by the woman he had always seen so cold, so haughty, so reserved.

"Taking their united hands in his, the old man murmured a fervent blessing on their heads. And then, for the first time since he became aware of the family dishonour, the tears of Henry Hamlyn burst forth."