A Hundred Years Ago
There is much that will be objected to in the book : the slang, the depravity, the grossness of the persons introduced, and represented to the life, may be expected to produce pretty much the same effect as three weeks at the tread-mill—where, such is the author's facility at 'imitation, it might shrewdly be suspeCted ho had passed a brief portion of his existence. His talent for this branch of painting was eminently shown in the character of Mr. Johnson, in Pelham, and his description of the thieves' asylum there minutely and powerfully depicted. Paul Clifford may be considered a great amplification of that account of the rogues' stronghold. The other parts of a higher cast are, we think, even of a higher order of powers. We speak after having reflected upon men as we have seen them, and upon all the creations of the novelists in their various reproductions of human nature ; and we declare, that one of the most powerful and the 'truest pictures ever drawn of .a bad man of great talents, is the character, portrait, and life of. the Lawyer Brandon—attorney, barrister, judge, and all but Chancellor. It shows in ite author a deep knowledge of human nature, not got froin books, but by looking right.through the hearts of men—not the men of history or the men of poetry, but the men of reality, who live the life, who strive and struggle, speak, write, lecture, wheedle, time-serve, trim, barter, smile, assert, retract, deny ; but still push on, deceiving and de. oeived, to- their great end—power or wealth—on the arena of this our most vicious, most glorious metropolis, the great hotbed of exaggeration, effort, stimulus, toil, talent, and tic douloureuz. We have studied this character from one end of the book to the other, and have examined and compared every point of it, and pronounce it perfect in its kind. Consistency and integrity in the drawing of a character is the great proof that the thing is a " creation and not a compilation. This test will prove that this severe but admit.. able portraiture is a conceptioestruck off from the brain of a man of • genius.
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