uence for home-keeping
purposes to Jean Paul, as the reader will doubtless confess before he
has proceeded far through the maze of Extra Leaves, Intercalary Days,
Extra Lines, Extra Shoots, and Extorted Anti-critique. And the divisions
which are busied with the story, instead of carrying it forward, stray
with it in all directions, like a genuine summer vagabond to whom direct
travel is a crime against the season. Many charming things are gathered
by the way; but if the reader is in haste to arrive, or thinks it would
not be amiss at least to put up somewhere, his patience will be severely
tried. We do not recommend the volumes for railway-reading, nor to
clergymen for the entertainment of sewing-bees, nor to the devourer of
novels, in whose life the fiction that must be read at one sitting forms
an epoch. It is a good _vade-mecum_ for a voyage round either Cape; its
digressive character suits the listless mood of the sea-goer, and he can
drop, we will not say the thread, but the entanglement, in whatever
watch he pleases.

Let no one expect the critic to sketch the plot of this romance. It is a
grouping of motives and temperaments under the names of men and women,
concerning whom many subtile things are said and hinted; and they are
pushed into and out of complicated situations, by stress of brilliant
authorship, without lifting their fingers. There is no necessary
development nor movement: the people are like the bits of glass which
shake into the surprising patterns of the kaleidoscope. The relation of
the parties to each other is a great mystification, bunglingly managed:
we cannot understand at last how Victor, the hero of the chief
love-passage, turns out to be the son of a clergyman instead of a lord,
and Flamin the son of a lord in spite of the plain declaration on the
first page that he belongs to a clergyman. No key-notes of expectation
and surmise are struck; the reader is as blind as the old lord who is
Victor's reputed father, and not a glimmer of light reaches him till
suddenly and causelessly he is dazed. The author has emphasized his
sentiments, but has not shaded and brought out the features of his
story. It is plain, that, when he began to write, not the faintest
notion of a _denouement_ had dawned upon his fancy. The best-defined
action in the book results from Flamin's ignorance that he is Clotilde's
brother, for he is thus jealous of his friend Victor's love for her. How
break off Flamin's love for