CONTARINI FLEMING
Is a rhapsody in four volumes. The hero is a genius—a corn.; pound of passion and imagination, who lives in two worlds at the same time,—his own, or a private world; and the public one, every body's world: in each he lives faster than any other mortal being. By birth, Contarini is a Swede; by pedigree, a cross between a Venetian lady and a German baron. Hence come the mixture of passion and philosophy. The youth runs away from his school df course; becomes in turn a poet, a bandit, a secretary of state; settles the affairs of Sweden by a sally in the shape of a protocol, and gets his father made prime minister, by proving in a hundred ways that his rival makes cream cheeses. This brilliant career he deserts for a wife and a wandering. His wife dies : he goes mad; recovers more than the sense he ever previously possessed; and we leave him, in his own opinion and that of his author, the very model of sobered wisdom. The chief characteristic of this work is its rapidity : time, space, and life, are nothing in it; wisdom is propounded in brief and. hurried sentences; and the most important transactions take place in the twinkling of an eye. The book is not otherwise than clever, though on the whole it is very absurd. It is a sentimental extra- vaganza, of a pseudo-German birth : it has the sentimentality and the mysticism of a German, with the nonchalance and the rapidity of PIG-AULT LE BRUN. This must be supposed to be mixed up with something peculiarly English: what that is, it is difficult to say, unless it be a reckless indifference to consequences, as shown in that exemplary work Lord BYRON'S Don Juan. The author we may suppose to be the writer of Vivian Grey; who has used this vehicle for rapidly introducing us to his travelled observations on Italy, Grece, and Egypt. We have no authority for this guess beyond internal evidence. The hero is in fact a German Vivian Grey, with a dash of the Venetian, to qualify him to run in romance.
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