ON

AFFAIRS.

No man ever ground down the educated poor of Great Britain as the very humane, very conscientious, and very religious Mr. Gladstone has done. We are not a little pleased to see the first blow struck at his financial policy. Among all needed reforms, there is no one of such immediate and real necessity as a reform in the Income-tax. Never, perhaps, were the qualities of doggedness and eccentricity combined in more odd proportions than in our present Chancellor of the Exchequer. Where he will be obstinate, and where he will belie his former self, and the common sense of almost every body besides himself, it is impossible to say. You can only be sure that the stubbornness and the mutability will come, and in about equal measure. We venture to say that no Cabinet can work harmoniously with such a colleague, and that no great interest can be safe in such hands.

The last quarter has witnessed a field-day on the question of Church Rates. Will the Lords reject what the Commons have declared should be law? Probably they will. But their Lordships will do well to remember that the feeling of the country in future will pronounce this impost a 'Lords'' tax, and that the existing feeling against it will be more than ever embittered by the remembrance that it is a twopenny tax perpetuated as an insult by the will of the peerage, in defiance of the Commons of Great Britain and Ireland. Churchmen, whether High or Low, do not add to the social influence of their church by pursuing such a policy. But what is the remedy? Let the church support herself. This is the remedy.' So writes a very high churchman.*

Mr. Turnbull's martyrdom is still in process. It seems strange that liberal gentlemen should be incapable of seeing the difference between opposition to a man as a Catholic and opposition to him as a proved bigot. It was high time that some move of this kind should be made. We speak from our own knowledge when we say, that the honourable confidence of the Master of the Rolls has been abused, and that in one instance at least, a volume which has appeared under his sanction has been made the depository of sectarian personalities, such as should never have found a place in works to be perpetuated as archives of a nation.

Why Church Rates should be Abolished. By William J. E. Bennett, M.A. Whittaker.

OUR EPILOGUE

ON

BOOKS.

LITERATURE.

The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany with Interesting Reminiscences of King George III. and Queen Charlotte. Edited by the Right Honourable LADY LLANOVER. Three Volumes. London: Richard Bentley. 1861.-What we expected to find in these volumes was some account, such as a lady in whom wit, fashion, and talent are pre-supposed, would be able to give of those innumerable things of which more serious history has scarcely condescended to take cognizance, but which show the real tendency of any section of mankind as surely as the straws, leaves, and twigs tell the direction of the stream on which they float. It is not from the vast stores of Parliamentary History, but from Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, Ballads, Newspapers, and the like, that we learn most completely what the state of the nation has at any time been. Such literature is highly prized and eagerly read, and in the times subsequent to its production it becomes invaluable. We took up Lady Llanover's volumes accordingly, not with the hope of receiving mere gratification, but imagining they would form a contribution of more than ordinary value to the growing mass of this kind of literature. Never was hope worse founded, or imagination more vain! These eighteen hundred and more pages are tedious, provoking, and idle to a degree all but incredible. They betray a negligence and misapprehension on the part of the editor which ought to have been impossible. It is with especial regret we say this. We do not remember that Lady Llanover has made any previous attempt of a literary kind, and it would have given us eminent satisfaction if, instead of conscientiously repudiating, we could have given warm commendation to her work. As it is, it appears to us that she has injured the reputation she designed to exalt, and that it would have been in every way better to leave these letters and fragments in the obscurity and oblivion for which alone they were fit.

Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, was born in 1700. Her father, Colonel Granville, though the descendant of a Royalist who was killed 'fighting for his king and country,' was suspected of disaffection to the Government which came into power on the death of Queen Anne, and removed from London into the country. An uncle and aunt wishing to help Colonel Granville, took his daughter Mary to live

with them, and brought her up for a future Maid of Honour. Returning to her father's, she is not well out of girlhood before a young man she styles Roberto declares himself her lover. His virago mother won't hear of such a thing, and his offer is accordingly declined. A few months later Miss Granville is on a visit to an uncle, Lord Lansdown, and receives a second offer. It is from a man old enough to be her grandfather. She feels an unconquerable aversion to him, but the dread of offending her uncle and of inconveniencing her father, lead her to accept Mr. Pendarves, and at seventeen years old she is a wretched, crushed, groom-abhorring bride. She seems to have been married less than a year when a scoundrel she calls Bassanio made the most dishonourable proposals, which Mrs. Pendarves treated as they deserved. She had to do the like in a little while after to another scoundrel, Carlo; by-and-bye, to a third, Germanico; and to a fourth, Clario! Now, that the morals of the beau monde were worse then than they are now we at once admit; but that Lady Llanover has done a wise and judicious thing to chronicle these disgusting proposals to the sister of her own lineal ancestress, we must be permitted to deny. For most persons-however unjustly-will be apt to suppose that there must have been something more than a gouty and drunken M.P. on one side, and a beautiful and vivacious young wife on the other, to permit four deliberate attempts by four different bon ton blackguards to commit so cruel and gross a crime..

It was with a satisfaction it would be harsh to blame, that in 1724 Mrs. Pendarves found herself a widow. During a widowhood of nineteen years she received various offers of marriage, and in 1743 became the wife of the Rev. Doctor Delany, afterwards Dean of Down. We follow Mrs. Delany through more than a dozen tedious years, and by the time we are half way through the third volume are growing anxious about the interesting reminiscences we were promised at the outset, and have been looking for all through. But our anxiety is superfluous. It gradually changes into hopelessness, and at the end of the book our eyes are opened. We there learn that the Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany in 'the third era of her existence,' are to form the commencement of the next volume.' That third era' was of twenty-eight years' duration, and includes 'interesting reminiscences,' in addition to autobiography and correspondence! and, accordingly, we fall into an excusable despair as we vainly endeavour to guess the whereabouts of the end of so oppressive and insufferable a book.

We know of no earthly, and we are sure there is no heavenly, reason, which can justify so complete a waste of time, labour, and money as is here before us. The whole occurrences, sayings, reflections, anecdotes, of these sixty-one years of Mrs. Delany's life that have a particle of interest for any besides her immediate connexions, might have been put into a tenth or twentieth of the space they now occupy, and would have gained immeasurably by the compression. Indeed, we are not clear that it would not, on the whole, have been better for

Autobiography, &c. of Mrs. Delany.

539

all concerned, save the publisher, if the materials of this work had long since perished.

The Autobiography consists of a few fragments in the first volume -not two hundred pages in all. The Correspondence is composed mainly of letters from Mrs. Delany to her sister, Mrs. Anne Granville, but includes also numerous letters from other persons, sometimes addressed to Mrs. Delany, frequently not. The connexion of these last with the life they should tend in some way to narrate, or describe, or illustrate, we have in most cases completely failed to make out.

In character and importance the very great majority of the letters are singularly inferior. What we complain of, however, is not that Mrs. Delany was an uninteresting correspondent, but that Lady Llanover has proved so ill-judging an editor. Mrs. Anne Granville at her house in the country may probably enough have been delighted when the postbag brought word that her sister in town had spent 'a 'whole night upon the water with Lady Harriet Harley; that they 'got into a barge at five in the afternoon, and landed at Whitehall 'Stairs; that they rowed up the river as far as Richmond, and were 'entertained all the time with very good music from another barge; that the concert in question was composed of three hautboys, two 'bassoons, flute, allemagne, and young Greenoc's trumpet; that they were to have had with them Mrs. Robinson the actress, but that a previous engagement obliged her to disappoint them; that while 'they lay before Richmond they ate some cold meat and fruit, and had 'a variety of wines, and that she, Mary Granville, Mrs. Pendarves, would not have enjoyed these things half so much had she not 'received a letter from Mrs. Carter that gave her a particular good 'account of her father,' &c. &c. Or try another example, taken literally at random, because the similarity of the letters makes proper choice superfluous and nugatory:-'You are very just to me, my 'dearest sister, in saying I will lose no opportunity of conversing with 'you, which indeed I will not; and you must lay it to the charge of 'anything but negligence when I happen to miss a post. Yesterday we shifted our quarters from Somerset House to Northend. It 'is said we shall stay here as long as the sun shines, and to say the 'truth, between you and I, London is a dismal place at present. streets are filled with nothing but dray-carts and hackney-coaches, 'out of which sometimes pops a pragmatical lawyer, with staring eyes and white gloves, but they might save themselves the trouble of 'looking, for I don't vouchsafe them my regard. If somebody had 'been with me (that shall be nameless), perhaps they would have 'sighed for 'one look more before we part for ever'. Lady Lan. 'made us a visit the day before we went to town; she looked thin and 'pale, Bess no changeling, but you have disobliged her, and she says 'she is bound to curse you as long as she lives.' (i. pp. 119, 120.) (Our readers will remember Dean Swift's Polite Conversations.) Try a third specimen. The writer is in her twenty-eighth or twentyninth year, and a widow. She rejoices in having so true and ardent a

The

friend as the sister to whom she is writing. She tells how she has seen Mrs. Oldfield in The Provoked Husband, and proceeds :Your country entertainment delights me more in your description ' than all that I saw at Court; and I assure you we had no such pretty 'sport. We had ogling and tweezing, and whispering and glancing; no eating or drinking, or laughing and dancing: there was standing and walking, and fine ladies airs, no smart repartee, and not one word of prayers. I cannot rhyme more; if you knew how hard my Muse is, 'you would be thankful for this production, which I believe is the effect of a quart of whey which I have drunk this morning,' &c. (i. 175, 176.)

Many of the letters read like the millinery ovation of the Court Journal after a ball or royal drawing-room. Mrs. Delany attended many such, and chronicles con amore the glories of 'petticoats,' the splendours of night-clothes,' the brilliance of stomachers,' the value of jewels, and the exuberance of 'patterns.'

It is no matter whether Mrs. Delany is a handsome widow or the wife of a prosperous and reverend Dean, is twenty, or forty, or sixty, her letters preserve the same traits with unfailing regularity. Whether she is hoping to become a 'dab' at Japan-work (sic), or to extort a deanery for her husband, or discoursing of her duties and engagements. as his wife, we have the same lively small-talk and monotonous narrowness of thought.

Of the editor's part of this work we have already expressed our opinion. That opinion is founded on a conscientious and laborious examination of the whole. We should have expressed it less decidedly, however, only for what we are obliged to deem the real gravity of her offence. Our references have not been made to singular or exceptional passages. Indeed, with the exception of a few of the letters, which are more than usually offensive, and of a few of the notes, which are of more than average foolishness, the whole contents of the volumes are singularly homogeneous. Such insipidity, uniform except as redeemed by occasional scandal, is seldom to be met with.

We had marked and transcribed for quotation two or three other passages, but suppress them partly from weary disgust, partly from considerations of another kind. It is related of Lord Chatham that on one occasion he was leaving the House of Commons just as some redoubtable dullard rose to 'reply' :-' Mr.

is up; won't you stay

'to hear what he says?' 'No; I have too deep a sense of being 'responsible to God Almighty for the use I make of my time, so to 'waste it.' Such was the substance of his answer, and such is one of the reasons why we take an earlier leave than we had intended of Lady Llanover's book.

Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar. A Story of an Interdict. By T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE, Author of Filippo Strozzi: A Biography; A Decade of Italian Women,' &c. &c. London: Chapman and Hall. 1861.-The most interesting of the moral phenomena presented by the close of the 16th century was the reaction by which