MRS. MABBRLY.
THE reader, when informed that the time of this fiction is laid in the year 2036, and that the subject of it is merely a com- mon novel love-story, and a picture of commonplace manners, will have no very lofty expectations from it. But he could not, without examination, have any idea of its objectless and ridiculous inventions, of its utter want of imagination or fancy, and of the total ignorance of the author, not in the rudiments of hia art, but in such rules of it as are to be gotten from the common run of the Minerva Press productions.
The only knowledge of character and manners which the writer seems to have, is that which is displayed in boarding-houses and watering-places : and accordingly, life of this kind is the only sort of life he attempts to describe. His book opens with a "second-rate boarding-house" in Civita Bella, a fashionable water- ing-place that is to be in Australia a hundred years hence. Some of the persons of the novel start thence for Vitrea, a glass city and fashionable resort directly under the North Pole. In their way they stop at another, or rather at a first-rate hotel, in Ceylon ; where the remainder of the characters are introduced, and the lovers fall in love, or lay the foundation of it. The next post is Vitrea itself; the action in which we have not closely ex- amined. but we have caught more than enough about subscription assemblies, securing apartments, and small tittle-tattle. At trea, however, the story closes with two marriages, to which no obstacle was ever interposed; and the third takes place in despite of Mrs. Maberly's scheme for its prevention ; which scheme is so preposterous, that till we had actually read it in print with our own eyes, we would have sworn by any decent form of adjuration, that nothing so absurd could have been imagined even by a raw novelist,—of course such affidavit always running "to the best of the deponent's belief." Having said so much against Mrs. Maberley, it is but fair to add, that the persons and conversation at the table dlaite are touched off with a truth and liveliness that show ability of a cer- tain kind, but rendered altogether useless from its possessor having attempted a task beyond his experience, or above his powers.
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