Court Life below Stairs ; or, London under the Last
Georges, 1760- 1830. By J. Fitzgerald Molloy. Vols. III. and IV. (Hurst and Blackett.)—We wonder whether Mr. Molloy is glad to have finished his task. That is the feeling with which, we fancy, most readers will arrive at the end of his fourth volume. It is, perhaps, ungrate- ful to say so, for he has taken a vast amount of pains to give us en. tertainment; and if the effect of the whole is something painfully mean, the fault is in the subject, and not the writer. Perhaps Mr. Molloy is a little hard in his judgments. How, indeed, could he help being so, after struggling through this mass of details, commonly so trifling, often so disgusting ? Yet the effect has been to give him a tinge of pessimism. George III. had more good in him than his last chronicler seems willing to give him credit for ; even George IV., though we say it with hesitation, may have had some gleam of better things about him that we do not find in the unredeemed blackness of Mr. Molloy's portraiture. (Is, by the way, the account of this King's last moments authentic ? It is quite unlike what we remember to have read before.) The volumes give us plenty of curious reading, and furnish, too, plenty of material for history.
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