fiction. But taking it such as it is, we see in it a field, the cultivation of which has been attained by female art, in a degree almost, if not quite, equal to that realised by the masculine gender. In fact, it is because the fashionable novel is a comparatively trivial matter, requiring powers of an order quite inferior to those essential to a higher range of art—it is because it is so much more easy to sparkle on the surface than to stem and direct the under-current—that a woman can write a "Cecil" which shall rival a man's "Pelham,” while she does not prove her ability to cope with the same man's "Rienzi." Both intellectually and morally, the fashionable novel occupies but humble rank. Of novels in general, the best which can be hoped is, according to Sir Walter Scott,[1] that they may sometimes instruct the youthful mind by real pictures of life, and sometimes awaken their better feelings and sympathies by strains of generous sentiment and tales of fictitious woe. Beyond this point—and we fear all fashionable novels must be so classed—they are, adds the greatest of novelists, "a mere elegance, a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half-love of literature which pervades all ranks in an advanced stage of society, and are read much more for amusement than for the least hope of deriving instruction from them." Meanwhile, we may safely aver of Mrs. Gore's expositions of frivolous high life, that it is almost impossible de donuer à des sottises une tournure plus agréable. Whatever we may think of her many-sided satire and her one-sided Whiggism, there is no denying her facile mastery of the materials with which she works. Each change of fashion's many-coloured life she knows and draws con amore—each aspect in the biography of its votaries, whether
In the full blaze of bonnets, and ribands, and airs—
Such things as no rainbow hath colours to paint,
or at a subsequent epoch, when
Time hath reduced them to wrinkles and prayers,
And the Flirt finds a decent retreat in the Saint.[2]
The true fashionable novelist has been described as enjoying the serenity of a fly upon a new-made grave, or an or-molu Venus above a French clock, smiling unmoved at her own gilded toe, heedless of the whirring wheels and straining springs, and the over-fleeting course of time below. We do not altogether confound Mrs. Gore with that school. She satirises, as well as depicts, the gay world. She shows it, and something more—she shows it up. She does not require us, as the true fashionable novelist does, to fall down and worship her image; nay, she bids us rap our knuckles on its brow, and mark the echo of sounding brass; or lay our hand on its side, and observe the absence of all pulsation, of all life. So keenly, indeed, does she see into and despise the weak points of the idol, that satire has become almost too habitual with her, and finds a quarry at every turn. It looks ungrateful in Diana's silver shrine-makers to deride the goddess, seeing that ἐκ ταυτης της ἐργασιας ἡ ἐυπορια ἀυτων εατι. Denizens of fashionable and pseudo-fashionable life there are, whom none can sketch with happier vraisemblance. Such as ministers' wives, who, while their husbands are inventing political combinations and specu-
