Hereditary Bowismen; or, Is it all in vain? (Tinsley Brothers.)—
This novel is a mixture of cleverness and absurdity, difficult to account for on any theory of mental construction. There is plenty of good- sense in its treatment of social questions, and in its exposition of some of the hardships of the Labour Laws, though the general tendency of the author is to exaggeration in his notions of the wrongs of labour and the iniquity of capital. The character of the chief personage, "Master Herrick," a stone-worker, and "bondsman," to the wicked employer (who is himself only a tool of an incomparably wickeder peer), is well drawn, and Herrick is decidedly interesting. But the writer has been unable to resist the temptation of turning him into the mere ordinary novel hero, who proves to be of old blood, when it is necessary for the high-born heroine either to betray her order by marrying, or to belie her character by rejecting him ; and the demon of the piece is an im- possibility of the most ludicrous and least original kind. The Earl of Burgos—an oddly conceived title for an English earldom—is a phantom he cannot be called a caricature, because he never could have existed for purposes of magnifying and distortion. He combines something of the Vampire (according to Mr. Boneicault), Sidonia, Monte Christo, the ubiquitous rascals who possess unbounded wealth, and never recognise the distinction between day and night, of Ponson du Termil's Rocambole literature, the princely manners of Miss Braddou's walking gentlemen, and the mechanical inventiveness of Mr. Harrison Ainsworth's school of art. This fascinating young nobleman, who controls the politics of the Empire and the fortunes of the hereditary bondsmen in Mr. Mason's stone-yard, who is an adept in crime and irresistible in society, who has underground methods of transport and hideous epileptic seizures (hardly compatible with his political position), is so absurd that he injures the claim of the novel to be regarded as a fair attempt to place certain kinds of social and industrial injustice before the public attention, in a form to which the public do not object to attend. Even without the Earl of Burgos, his familiar spirit, who converses with him on the principle of flat contradiction, and his epilepsy, there is a great deal too much of the book. The zeal of the author is not more evident than his in- discretion.
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