are superficially drawn, and, when we close the book, they leave hardly a trace behind to recal and perpetuate the circumstances under which we "were first acquent." The author's penchant for political agitation and polemical romance, of which later years produced notable proofs in the career of Michael Armstrong and Jessie Phillips, declared itself in 1836 by the publication of the "Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jeffreson Whitlaw"—an atrocious rascal, who plays pranks to make angels weep and gentlemen swear, upon slave-hordes of what old Fuller called "God's images cut in ebony," on the banks of the Mississippi. For depicting an unmitigated scoundrel of the A 1 force—one of those male excrescences of human nature which now and then appear in paper and print—commend us to female novelists in general and Mrs. Trollope in particular. To adopt a fastidious paraphrase, she goes the entire animal. Othello peered downwards to see whether Iago had not cloven feet.[1] The feet of Mrs. Trollope's splendid sinners reveal the cleft—almost as deep as a well, and as wide as a church door—through patent leather and all. Wondrous is her arithmetical mastery of these impossible quantities. A good hater herself, she indoctrinates us with her principles, until the force of hating can no further go, and the sense of our incapacity to wreak summary vengeance on the objects of it becomes intolerable, and makes us scream for the police, or frantically devise other retaliatory measures, The prosperity of Mr. Whitlaw increases our repugnance to his mal-practices; and the savage relief we feel when he is at last checkmated in the game of life, by that grim old Obi crone, is positively unchristian in its ebullitions. Yet Jonathan is ably represented: and other characters there are in the book which attest the writer's vigour and comprehensive skill—as Lotte Steinmark, the winsome German Fraulein, and Lucy Bligh, and Aunt Clio—(great is Mrs. Trollope in the matter of aunts). In the following years "The Vicar of Wrexhill" made his celebrated début; and to this hour that clerical notoriety is considered by many—taking him and his history together—the masterpiece of his race. As usual, the story bristles with satire of the roughest, and, as usual, it excited a stormy outcry from those whom it assailed. That the Doctor Cantwell, or Tartuffe, of this work, is an exaggerated piece of moral deformity we should be sorry to doubt; and that the acrimony and heat of Mrs. Trollope's strictures en masse are offensive and immoderate we are constrained to hint. But we fancy she did the state some service by this exposé of Jesuitism in social life—this onslaught upon the morbid phases of the "Evangelical" school. So far we view it with a degree of approval similar to that we award to Sydney Smith's crusade against the Methodists,[2] when he laughed at the accounts of Providence destroying an innkeeper at Garstang, for appointing a cockfight near the Tabernacle, and of a man who was cured of scrofula by a single sermon, and of the poor Leather-lungs who, when he rode into Piccadilly in a thunderstorm, imagined that alt the uproar of the elements was a mere hint to him not to preach at Mr. Romaine's chapel. We incline to hold with a distinguished clerical poet, that
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Female Novelists—No. V.
