THE BOOKS OF THE SEASON.

LITERARY SPECTATOR.

SITTING by the -fireside, between as it were two years, the old and the new, at twelve o'clock at night on the 31st of December ; listen- ing, pen in hand, to the drunken chimes of the bells, which an- nounce in this instance the passing, not of a body to the grave—of a being from one state of existence to another, but of the soul of this year into the infant of next ; we cannot help looking back upon our brief SPECTATOR life, and in the spirit of a critic, turning over in mind the good and the bad books it has been our lot to re- view. A mere man at such a moment reflects simply upon his deeds, and reckons with his conscience : a critic, called to a higher state of public existence, has to account for the just exercise of his judicial functions. No sense of injury disturbs our repose : we have been AaisrinEs himself in the purity of our motives : our withers are unwrung as we look over the list of those works which we condemned to oblivion or promoted to the enjoyment of per- petual fame. The sole consideration which disturbs us is, that the subjects that have presented themselves at our bar have not been entitled to so much respect as we could have wished : we ,are afraid we might have been doing something better than settling the destinies of a rparcel of very ephemeral produc- tions. Full half of the good old year has been employed by us in weighing in the balance the dust of novels, tales, romances, souvenirs, sketches, fugitive pieces,. &c. ; and although we will not suppose for a moment that we have failed to enlighten the ptiblic respecting them and things in general, we confess that we feel our own intellectual state very little the better for the mass of hot-pressed paper that has performed its revolutions before our wearying eyes. When the critic receives information, feels his own facilities sharpened and improved, and his views enlarging and extending under his book, his occupation is one of pure de- light. He is not in a situation to profit himself, but to spread the advantage of knowledge and confer the merited tribute of praise upon its author. But when his critical time is spent upon an in- vestigation of the claims of writings which turn out to have none, then indeed is his lot unenviable. The literary world is so overrun with works of fiction, that, however excellent they may be of the kind, the constant perusal of such books converts the judge into the lounger of a circulating library—into an idle reader for mere amusement ; and if the nature of his studies were made known to bystanders, they would all exclaim against the frivolous pursuits of one known to be grave and seen to be wise. It is now some weeks since we have had almost anything submitted to our notice besides works of fiction : the practical evil of which is, that the sight of a novel becomes so odious that we apprehend we may sometimes be induced to do less than justice to those which come last. We are far from despising this class of writing : on the contrary, we deem it the source of much innocent amusement, and it may be made the channel of a knowledge of the world : novels may prove guides in morals, and present us with a fund of agreeable and useful in- formation respecting the manners, habits, and institution's of foreign lands. Our objection applies solely to the extraordinary confluence of talent to this department, to the neglect of more im- portant modes of communicating intelligence, and the studies better calculated to lead to useful discoveries, to the advancement of knowledge, to the increase of the permanent happiness of mankind.

The books which have made any impression on our minds are

easily enumerated: they lie in a small compass. At the moment of reviewal, a critic is too anxious to explain the nature of a work, and convey an idea of the talent displayed, and the character assumed by a production, to be solicitous in settling its ultimate claims to respect. He compares it with similar works, and speaks gene- rally of the immediate pleasure of perusal. When six months are gone by, and a new year presents itself, he is in a far better con- dition for estimating their real value.

One of the first books that came under our notice was Waesn's

Journey from Constantinople, through Bulgaria, Wallachia, and Hungary ; and we still retain a grateful recollection of the variety of its information, and the interesting nature of his experience, and the novelty and seasonableness of his subject. Mr. CRAU- FURD'S Mission to Siam and Cochin China was a valuable addi- tion to our knowledge of Oriental countries ; and by the singularity of many of its details, by the contrast which it afforded to our own modes and institutions, had the most amusing effect upon the reader.

When we have mentioned these two works, which have been

published since the First Number of the SPECTATOR, there are none other to put on the same shelf. Dr. GRANVILLE'S St. Peters- burg rivals them in bulk, it is true, but in nothing else. The Doc- tor s work is a curious specimen of what industry can accumulate in a short time. It is, however, a mere product of pen, scissars, and pence. All that a man can cut, scribble, or buy out of other books—road-books, guide-books, or what not—is to be found in this curious compilation. The gaiety is the Doctor's own. With all this, it is creditable to the writer that he so well employed a leisure which most other persons would have spent in repose, in eating and drinking, in lounging, in idle talk. Lieutenant BRAND'S Passage across the Andes is a book of travels, but of a very slight kind : it is, however, amusing, and the Lieutenant is adventurous : he travelled on his back a consi- derable number of hundred-yards, and used to anoint his face with many pounds of tallow candles, in order to resist the action of the wind and cold. Ur. AULDJO has also climbed ; the scene of his exploits was Mont Blanc, the result a handsome quarto. His en- gravings remain in our memory ; and nothing will ever erase his account of finding the broken bottle containing Dr. CLARKE'S pompous letter to posterity, with the writing nearly obliterated by the wet. Mr. KINSEY'S Portugal, which falls into the same class of works, is, like Mr. Auanio's but in a different way, indebted chiefly to the artist. His plates are beautiful, but his prose is flimsy : the poetry which he quotes is to be had with the works of BYRON, MOORE, and others. Mr. KINSEY is a book-maker, but it is for the boudoir—he is a lady's book-maker. In Italy As It Is—which is not exactly a book of travels, but a book of foreign residence—we were disappointed : we expected better things from the author's Four Years' Residence in France. What we admire in this author is the repose with which he writes : we love his calm- ness, his philosophic indifference to all but a few small topics, on the head of which he is no longer agreeably mild, but placidly in- sane. He is one of the most extraordinary of bigots—a pleasant, cheerful, and interesting bigot ; one who, with the utmost benevo- lence of heart and purpose, would smile at an auto- da-fe ; and who, rational and intelligent on any other subject, believes in the in- fallibility of the Pope, and the holiness and miracles of all the Ro- man Church's saints, down to the wonders worked at the tomb of Abbe Paris.

The Memoirs of General Miller, and the Recollections of the Colombian Officer, may follow the works we have been speaking of. Of the latter we fear that our first impressions were too favourable —we believed in this writer's truth : if he had been honest, we should have been right : we fear, however, that in believing him we were very much in the wrong. We detest deliberate lies in two volumes ; and if, as we now fear, more than three parts of the book is false, we would willingly see its author flagellated at the tail of a cart. General MILLER'S book, or rather his brother's, is honest, but dull : had the actor been also the author, it would have been charming. It is plain to see where the compiler has copied the General's letters. We shall not soon forget his campaign in the Puertos Intermedios.

We remember speaking with some favour of Mr. Cooaaa's Ameriran Notions. We suppose we had good reasons for it at the time: our present recollections of it serve to inform us only that it is a mass of conceited verbiage. In poetry, we have had absolutely nothing. Mr. ATHERSTONE'S Nineveh we could say nothing good of, though an elaborate article is written upon it in the last Edinburgh. After all, we believe that we are the only just tribunal sitting. We forbear to go over the novels we have reviewed, even with a word for each : let our old sentence be recorded. Zillah is worse even than we said—Pelhanz better ; but the author of the Disowned is no grave philosopher, as he would wish to be thought. " iVollekens and his Wife ," by SMITH, is, as we said before, a book of character which will live : we should say that it is by far the most lasting book of this season.

The works which we have borrowed from our neighbours are very little less numerous, and, on the whole, they possess a higher character than the majority of English books we have been com- pelled to notice.

The Memoirs of the Due de Rovi go are an invaluable contribu- tion, to the historian : they are too controversial to be agreeable for the mere general reader. To understand ROVIGO, requires a familiarity with all the Continental questions for the last thirty years, which can only be expected in the student. The Memoirs of the Empress Josephine, are a specimen of the lightest and plea- • santest collections of historical bon mots. The Songs VBeranger need only be named. The Memoirs of Tilly form the life of a man of pleasure and passion at the epoch just previous to the French Revolution : they are an admirable continuation of the old French memoirs, and carry on the history of European manners to the present century. The Autobiography of Vidocq is perhaps the most remarkable book of its age : it is the real life nearest to fic- tion, or the fiction nearest to real life, that the interminable inven- tion of man ever devised. We believe Vinoco to be honest : if he be, he is a hero of a thieftaker ; and whether he be honest or not, assuredly he is a man of genius.

Such is our last account, at the end of the year, of the books of the season : this is our final reckoning with ourselves. An infant hour, the first-born of 1829, has just shown its face in the world ; and we shall proceed to dream of the pleasures of futurity—of fairy books, still unwritten, and imaginary criticisms, no more painful than the waving of a wand and as potent as Merlin's rod.

WE have said so much about other books, that we have hardily left ourselves space to speak of the last work we have read, the Hungarian Talent—certainly not as they deserve. They are the best national tales we remember : as illustrative of manners they are peculiarly delightful : and simply as tales, we know of few so simple, so novel, so pathetic—in one word, so charming.

Hungary is the least known portion of Europe ; while its insti- tutions are the most striking, its manners the most picturesque, and the number of its tribes, and the distinctness of their preju- dices,habits, and language, afford the greatest variety of singular con- trasts. Such is the richness of the field; but we should be doing an in- justice to the authoress if we did not bear testimony to the general talents of the writer, which are independent of the accident of g havin travelled over or lived in scenes of great interest. She understands human nature, and can paint its passions, its high virtues and its

* Hungarian Talt. vole. London, 182C, iiunderfr and Otley. •

vicious failings. ' Such a picture is that of the Countess Lingotski ; which would have been equally effective had she been born in Lon- don instead of bred at Pesth. The two tales which have, however, pleased us most, are Sleko the Tsigany, and the Balsam-bearer of Thurotzer: they are both inimitable.

On the title-page, the author (or authoress, for we only infer the sex) professes to have also written something called the -Lewes de Cachet: what it may be, we do not know ; but we regret that we . have not seen it, since it proceeded from the same pen as the gun- .. barian Tales.

It would require too much explanation of previous circum- stances were we to attempt to extract some of the more remark- able scenes of these Tales : but an isolated passage occurs in the tale called " Cassian," which affords an excellent general view of the manners of the country ; and which may be understood without saying more than that Zeriny, an eminent merchant of Pesth, is es- corting his orphan niece from her former abode at Trieste to his home in Hungary.

" ' The country you are about to inhabit,' he replied, ' and which I trust, dear child, you may learn to consider your own, will suggest many such inquiries. We are come of a rude race, Iiilina ; a race of warriors, whose foot hath been forced to rest in the stirrup, and whose hand upon the 'sabre, in order to resist the incursions of the barbarous tribes by which we are surrounded. Turks and Tartars, Moslems and Idolaters, have equally retarded our advancement in civilization, by impkdiiig the cultivation of those arts of peace which form the true wealth of , a pros- perous nation.' .

" ` But you speak, dear uncle, of the troubled days of the olden time.'

" ` Remember, that so recently as the year 1682 the Turks had posses- sion of our capital; and since that period, since the gratitude entertained by the Hungarians towards Leopold the first, for rescuing them from the Turkish yoke, rendered their crown hereditary in the honse of Austria, we have been deprived of the advantage of an independent government, and of a resident sovereign. Such, 'Wine, are the mischances which have prolonged the existence of feudal law in Hungaryelong after the causes which suggested its adoption have ceased to exist. The Hungarian nobles, in affording their land personal defence against invasion, as well as maintenance for her armies, might fairly claim exemption from the ordinary duties of a citizen, and the subsidiary taxati"sin of a subject. But thanks to Providence, the banners of war have king been furled; and peace demands protection, in her turn, for the sons of her common- wealth.'

My dear father hath often assured me,' observed Jana, ' that since the abolition of villanage in Hungary, the condition of the peasants has been greatly ameliorated, and that the Emperor Joseph II., in rendering back to the nobles the rights of which fie had deprived them, insisted upon the retention of that protecting edict so important to their vassals.'

" "I'he arbariam, or contract between lord and peasant? True, liilina ; nor is it upon the labouring classes that the injurious effects of the existing constitution fall the most heavily. You are aware that during the early troubles of the kingdom, when its monarchs were con- stantly harassed and driven from their capital,—their revenues impo- . verished,—and their resources exhausted,—a grant of nobility afforded their only means of exciting or rewarding the loyalty of their subjects.

Thus whole districts were ennobled at once, ou will find that my #

herdsmen and miners, and domestic servant 4r oble, and have a-voige in the legislature of their country ; while their fin 411hIaLthough assuredly their superior in education,' wealth, and litmerality of sentiment, is for ever excluded therefrom, and must remain Classed below them in the scale of national estimation. Yonder untutored savage, who is driving the plough, wrapped in his undressed sheep'steleknehath, I doubt not, a patent of nobility in his pocket; which would not only sanctify any in- solence he might be pleased to exhibit, but enable him to opine in the senate of the county ; which secures him from arrest, ay, even in case of murder,—until the crime be proved in three several courts,—and even when proved exempts him from capital piiniihnient, and renders himself and his successors free from taxation or tribute of every description.'

It is then upon the middle class that the burden falls so heavily?'

Even so. In extending- the commerce of my native city, I have had to combat every difficulty that prejudice and pride, and a vicious Consti- tution could throw in my path; and although the fruits of my industry pour a ten-thousand fold richer tribute into the Ilung,arian treasury than is exacted from the united nobility of the kingdom, yet am I stigmatized as worthless to the state ; and am liable to be:minsulted, reviled, smitten, by those whose brutality is authorized by thirklaw of the land. You will not wonder then, Iiilina, that a class so heavily oppressed,—the extensive and valuable class of middle life,—should exhibit the stains of the fetters they are so ungenerously condemned to wear, that they should re- main obscure, unaspiring, ignnrant, and unpolished ; and. that the man-- nets should fly from all contact with so degraded a society. You will fin% Absenteeism to be the prevailing evil which retards the civilization of our ancient kingdom, now alas.! reduced to the degradation of existing as an Austrian province. All the leading nobles whose opulence and en- lightment might aid the advancement of their native land, carry their splendour and their costliness to the loot of the Emperor's throne. The mightiest names of Hungary now belong to Vienna.'

" 'Bit surely Pesth retains a sufficient number of the magnets to form an honourable society ?' " ' We have, indeed, many noble lovers of their country settled among us, in patient expectation or the dawning of a brighter day. In Buda, where the court of the Palatine affords them some slimy of favour, they. are still more numerons ; and in Presburg, whose vicinity to theAustrian capital insures them higher refinement, and lighter pleasures, the ancient hotels of the nobles are permanently occupied. But, generally speaking, the magnets fly from the impoverished aspect of that wretched country which owes its miseries to their predominance; and which requires but equal administration, and a liberal constitution, to take an honburable position among the nations of Europe.' " ' You have, I perceive, in compassion to my terrors, withdrawn my attention from the original question,' observed Rilina. • 'May I again inquire whether these districts are truly so perilous to travellers as report avouches ?'

"'The Croats and Sclavonians are a rude race,' answered her uncle. 'Their native lords presume not to travel unarmed ; for they know that oppression and destitution have made their vassals desperate. We have now, however, nothing to tear. Yonder village is Stuhlweissenburg, —all that remains of thm. ancient residence of the elective kings of Hun- gary,— of the superb Alba Res-alis.' " ' The constant incursions of our barbarian neighbours,' said Iiilina, must have been, indeed, fatal to the interests of antiquity.'

" ' They spared nor monument nor archive. We are equally destitute of written literature and of historical records. But you are tired, love,' said he, interrupting himself; as they entered the paltry town, or rather village, once so celebrated under a royal name, in the Hungarian an- nals; tired of my homily, and of your journey. We will rest here for the night.'

"They drove accordingly into the three-sided building, whose pieitza extending round a court, announced the inn of Stuhlweissenburg. An external staircase, and balcony ornamented the inner wall ; at the foot of which, the waiter—booted, and spurred, and mustachioed—was loung- ing in easily negligence. Several tame storks were stalking through the filth of the court-yard, and digging their long bills into its mysteries of dirt and rubbish. The disorderly air of the establishment, and the careless coolness of its directors, afforded to the weary travellers just as repulsive a reception as may be met with in every inn of every road in Hungary."