doings-, of other concentric circles of artificial life. Though she, perchance,
is vicious in her guess,
As, we confess, it is her nature's plague
To spy into abuses; and, oft, her jealousy
Shapes faults that are not.[1]
and though it is objected, with reason, that her satire is directed against the mere superficialities of life, and is little calculated to check vice or encourage virtue; and though there may be in her lightest mirth a bitter and virulent spirit, which is "as misplaced as it is unfeminine," still do we owe her something for her persevering war against hypocrisies and shams, and her merciless raillery of frippery and pretence in a thousand Protean guises. Among the fictions of this last epoch are her "Robertses on their Travels,"[2] "Father Eustace," "The Three Cousins," "Town and Country; or, the Days of the Regency," "The Young Countess," "The Lottery of Marriage," "Petticoat Government," "Second Love; or, Beauty and Intellect," and "Mrs. Mathews; or, Family Mysteries." Tory as she is, and prejudiced as she so frequently shows herself, it is unjust to accuse her of exclusiveness or sectarianism in the use of her sarcasms. No one class appropriates her irony. No one pariah society is the recipient 6£ her hard words. Wherever, high or low, she discerns what she honestly believes to be weak points or vicious abuses, she as honestly proclaims war, and incontinently fires a broadside. She is, in fact, one of the most catholic of satirists—a very Ishmaelite in the impartiality of her pugilism—one who looks out for squalls on every coast and in every latitude, plying her craft in mid-seas as well as in creeks and shallows, in tropic and arctic zones, in waters salt and fresh, for prey large and small, and treating all as fish that comes to her net. What a capacious net! what a prodigious take of the "finny tribes!" and what a marvel that not yet is the net broken! How dear to this enterprising voyager the "blue above and the blue below—the blue, the fresh, the ever free—without a mark and without a bound!"[3]
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean,
may exclaim Mr. Colburn and the libraries of the United Kingdom; for it is this lady's joy "on thy breast to be borne, like a bubble onwards," reflecting thy profoundest azure, and rivalling thy unrestful energy and varying aspects: thee she loveth
in all time,
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark heaving;—boundless, endless and sublime![4]
