day;" not even Knowles, not even Bulwer, not even Talfourd. "No," adds the writer, as if he had recoiled in astonishment at his own thunder, and then come back again resolved to be convinced, "no, there is Rot one!" The enumeration of the acted dramatists of the age, is confined to Jerrold, Planché, Bernard, Buckstone, Oxenford, Dance, Mark Lemon, Moncrieff, Coyne, Leman Rede, Lunn, Peake, Poole; and we are told that nearly all the best authors compose the bright band of the unacted dramatists, whereupon we are referred for some of "the finest dramatic writing and situation [think of that, Master Brooke !] of modern times," to Lord Francis Egerton, Lord John Russell, Lord John Manners, and Lord Beaumont! If the great unacted be so strong, they can afford to be just. Why should they omit from the roll of acted dramatists the honoured names of Almar, and Dibdin Pitt, and Stirling, and the gentleman who executes equestrian dramas for the Amphitheatre? If, as the writer says, "Moncrieff only wanted to have fallen on a better age to have been ranked with some of the dramatists of a nobler era," what might not have happened' if Mr. Batty's poet had flourished a little lower down the river on the same side in the sixteenth century? The notion of Moncrieff falling on an age, and the age being the better or the worse for the fall, or he for the age, is exquisitely comical. No wonder our critic should be perplexed by Thomas Ingoldsby, who is just the man to throw such a critic into fits. In one of the legends a knight twists off his wife's head. The critic indignantly asks whether he is in jest or earnest. "Serious or comic?" he demands; "surely this cannot be meant as a laughable thing, but as a dreadful actual revenge? at any rate, however, it is laughed at, and the very next couplet institutes a paraphrastic comparison with Humpty Dumpty, who sat on a wall! all the king's doctors and all the king's men,' sings the primitive muse-who is sometimes rather too gay''can't put fair Alice's head on agen!"" It is not that the muse of Ingoldsby is too gay or too sanguinary, but that she is not altogether one thing or the other. Had Ingoldsby written in the fashion of Blue Beard, or Jack the Giant-killer, and slain his victims with becoming seriousness, all would have been right. Nobody complains of Blue Beard's blood-thirstiness; on the contrary, it is generally regarded as the chief grace and fascination of his character. But Ingoldsby must act Blue Beard in broad grins. This is dreadful. His legends seem to possess the singular property attributed to the herb sardonia-they kill you with laughter; an irreverent sort of mirth which fairly takes the Jegs from under the dignity of criticism. It might be supposed that the close neighbourhood of so much rich humour would have the effect of shedding an air of pleasantry over the savage cruelties of this incomprehensible muse. There are, undoubtedly, many people who think the legends a pure rush of genuine fun, poured out from a kind of impulse, as birds sing simply out of the fullness of their music, without much caring or knowing why or wherefore. Our critic thinks differently. He is satisfied that the jokes and volubility are only thrown in to divert attention from the real slaughtering purpose at the bottom, and that Thomas Ingoldsby is in fact a sort of legendary ogre. When the knight twists off fair Alice's head, (which 219 he had previously twisted on) the reviewer says it must be meant "as a dreadful actual revenge!" And although Humpty Dumpty makes his appearance in the very next couplet on the top of the wall, he is still of the same opinion. If Humpty Dumpty failed to throw any light upon the business, we may give it up in despair. Being convinced then that Ingoldsby's intention is to inculcate battle and murder and all manner of physical horrors for the pleasure of them, he proceeds to exhibit some of the proofs on which he erects his faith. He is speaking of the legend of Glugulphus, a worthy man who was murdered once upon a time by his wife, assisted by a learned young clerk, who had his own reasons for wishing him out of the way: "Having dismembered him limb from limb,' says the critic, "cutting off his hands at the wrists, by means of the great sugar-nippers, they determine upon throwing his head down the well. Before doing this, however, they cut off his long beard, and stuff it into the cushion of an arm-chair, all of which is laughably told. Then, the muse does not mean to be serious? This is not intended as an account of a murder done, or any thing beyond a joke. Read the next stanza. They contrived to pack up the trunk in a sack, Which they hid in an ozier-bed outside the town, Exactly this is the point at issue-here is the direct, clearly-pronounced com- This is the gist of the whole criticism. Finding that the young clerk dissected Glugulphus with a pair of sugar-nippers, all of which is very circumstantially related, and that he stuffed an arm-chair with his beard, the critic begins to suspect that Ingoldsby must be only in fun. His own extensive observation through life comes to the help of his critical faculties, and never having heard of a dissection by a pair of sugar-nippers, especially the cutting off the hands at the wrists, he is just about to be of opinion that the whole thing is a piece of rigmarole, when unluckily his eye falls upon the next stanza. That next stanza settles the question. Fun do you call it? says he; fun? Read the next stanza. There you will find whether it is fun or not? What do you think of bringing in Mr. Greenacre and Mrs. Brown by name? There is no joke in that, but the real thing presented to the imagination. "Thrown off our guard," he says, " by the comicalities of the style, such things might be passed over with a laugh the first time (they have been so, too generally); but a second look produces a shudder, recollecting, as we do, the previous allusion to Greenacre, and knowing that those horrors are not meant for pantomime." You see, he knows, this acute critic knows that they are not meant for pantomime. Having established this fact to his own entire satisfaction, he winds up his opinion into a general proposition, namely, that others apply laughter and ridicule "to a moral purpose, viz., to the diseased appetite for horrors," but that Ingoldsby applies them" to the horrors themselves." ing t This is the charge-that Ingoldsby looks upon murder not as a capital offence, but as a capital joke; considers Mr. Greenacre a humorist of the first water; and would infinitely prefer a bowl of poison to a bowl of punch. It never occurred to this sincere wiseacre, that there was something else to ridicule besides the diseased appetite for horrors-namely, the diseased food by which it is nourished. He sees plainly enough that Ingoldsby indulges in a jocose use of horrors, and he takes his stand upon that. If he had looked an inch further he must have discovered that all this raw-head and cross-bones,whimsicality is the vent, not of a scoffing spirit, but of a strong wit lashing with matchless ridicule the ribald and profane narratives of horror, which daily solicit the morbid sympathies of the public in an endless variety of shapes. Look at the daily newspapers-look at the weekly papers, when a diabolical murder has been perpetrated. Look at the column after column of sickening items, the exact geography of the spot, the biography of the murderer, embellished, perhaps, with a faithful likeness. Visit the spot while cudriosity riosity is yet keenly directed towards it thousands of people are crushing onwards, jammed, yelling, eager, maddened to gaze at the bed, the doorway, the window where the atrocity was done, and to refresh their jaded imaginations by "realising" the locality; observe the halfpenny sheets of fabulous particulars dispersed amongst the multitude to stimulate them into still fiercer luxuries of speculation; while the memory of the event itself is perpetuated by medals, relics, and bleary wood-cuts destined to be hung up in cottage-parlours for the benefit of the "rising generation." When you have thoroughly explored this phase of our national taste, good wiseacre, and perceived the evil that is done by treating the things seriously, and by allowing a grave relish for them to grow up amongst the people, you will be qualified to understand the healthy and solemn purpose which lies beneath the apparently fantastical vagaries of Thomas Ingoldsby. We believe that more effectual remedies for social vices of this intangible nature-vices, that are evasive of legislation, and too subtle in their working to be much influenced by the ordinary expression of Public Opinion are found in the successful use of well-directed ridicule than in the beadle's whip or the hanginan's noose. And Thomas Ingoldsby has scourged the brutal taste in a way not likely to be forgotten. He has heaped overwhelming satire upon that minute style of delineating crime, which might be said to have created the passion upon whose indulgence it subsisted; and he has given such an effectually ludicrous turn to the genius for the horrible, that the whole school of penny-a-line pathos may be fairly said to shudder through his verses and expire in their echoes. But Ingoldsby, although he has most effectually succeeded in bewildering the brains of the critic, is not the only individual misrepresented in this book. There are several very odd configurations of men of genius. Carlyle is described as one who "has knocked out his window in the wall of his century." Mr. Milnes is informed that instead of writing poetry for the people, he ought to have written it for the philosophers; but," adds the writer, "the very philosophers should be of the upper house, and accustomed to tread softly upon Plato's car 66 pets, or-" what does the reader suppose would be the consequence ?— they would be found inevitably defective, now and then, in their range of sympathies !" Of Mr. Fonblanque we have the following curious description. Fonblanque seems not so much to fight"on editorial perch," as to stand with an open code of social laws in one hand, and a two-edged sword in the other, waving the latter to and fro with a grave face, while dictating his periods to the laughing amanuensis. This is very much like the story of the Hibernian who wrote a challenge with a pistol in each hand. Mr. Dickens, we are told, is "a great walker, and very much given to dancing Sir Roger de Coverley." When Hartley Coleridge is spoken of, the Coleridge is referred to as his "eminent father." Mr. Wordsworth is said to have "laid his hand on the Pegasean mane, and testified that it was not floss silk;" a fact upon which there could be no great difficulty in collecting evidence. Alfred Tennyson, our critic informs us, avoids general society, "and would prefer sitting up all night talking with a friend, or else to 'sit and think alone.' The work teems with such curt and soberlooking trivialities. We could quote a sheet of them. Cui bono? Long before this number of our Magazine shall have been bound up into its volume, and taken its place upon the library shelves of our readers, this "New Spirit of the Age" shall have quietly evaporated into oblivion. Let it go. THE WILFULNESS OF WOMAN.* AMONGST the novels which of late years made a decided impression on the public mind the "History of a Flirt" deserves a conspicuous place. It was a first production, and exhibited an intimate acquaintance with the working of human feelings and social influences. It was succeeded by the "Manoeuvring Mother," in which the author addressed herself to a different phase of fashionable experiences, and with an amount of success which quite justified the expectations she originally excited. Her third novel is now before us. It may be gathered from the titles of these works that the writer sets out with a clear design-that she always proposes to herself the solution of some moral problem; the only mode of proceeding (if the esthetical principles of criticism may be relied upon) by which a complete artistical result can be obtained. Her first work was a capital specimen of the class. The whole mystery of "flirtation" was explored and laid bare in its pages with a fearless hand and philosophical purpose. Nor is the writer less resolute in the courage with which she now assails a still graver womanly vice, which, for delicacy and euphony, she softens down into the gentle term-wilfulness. The novel reading world has resolved into a canon of drawing-room * The Wilfulness of Woman. By the authoress of "The History of a Flirt," "The Manoeuvring Mother," &c. opinion a fact which is obvious enough in itself-namely, that women It The "moral" of this novel, indicated clearly enough by its title, is developed through two or three "cases"-if one may say so-of female self-will. In none of these instances is the obstinacy over-drawn. never stands out so sharply on the canvas as to appear hard or unnatural. They are one and all precisely such patterns of womanly wrongheadedness as may be fallen in with night after night throughout a fashionable season at the west-end. Novels of this description do not depend so much upon their dramatic texture, as upon the strength and earnestness of their delineation of real life. The means are generally of less importance than the end. We are engrossed too much by the truth of the portraiture to care how it is brought about, or by what contrivances it is to be followed up. The actors are every thing in these stories of the actual world-the carpenters and scenery nothing. Hence we are prepared to find the plot of such a novel as this neither very skilful nor very intricate. As a mere matter of plot, there is scarcely any thing new or startling to attract or surprise the reader. Two fair cousins of opposite character marry the men of their choice -the one a man of sense, with the sanction of her friends, the other an empty fop against their consent. The issues of these boldly contrasted marriages may be easily predicated. The former secures a life of happiness-the latter is deserted by her worthless husband. In the progress of these two lines of domestic experience we have a variety of glimpses at the great world of fashion, whose heartlessness, levity, and vice, are exposed with such success, and at the same time with so much good taste, that nobody can be the worse, and a great many people ought to be the better for the perusal of this strange although not very eventful history. The dialogues are occasionally too lengthy; but they are always written with spirit and considerable conversational tact. Sometimes they soar into the wit of comedy, and sustain the flight with grace and buoyancy. Take a sparkle of their gaiety from the following passage. The lady is married to an old general, and is making a confidante at first-sight of her sister-in-law, to whose house in town she has just come upon a visit. The very openness of her confessions is characteristic of her nature. Lady Sarah Monteith loved gaiety for its own sake, and courted it also as a means of filling up a large portion of valuable time. She was beholden to society for hours and days of amusement, which could not be obtained in domestic retire |