of the
commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they
talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there. If
they want the truly sublime and awful, they will find them there also.
But they will find none of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a
metaphor; no taint of this new poetic diction into which we have now
fallen, after all our abuse of the far more manly and sincere "poetic
diction" of the eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the
way to argue and moralise, and grumble at Providence, and show off the
author's own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real
works of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what
they want to say, saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest,
the most finished words. Saying it--rather taught to say it. For if that
"divine inspiration of poets," of which the poetasters make such rash
and irreverent boastings, have, indeed, as all ages have held, any
reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as
these, appeals from an unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men
whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that mere passionate
sensibility, which our modern Draco once described when speaking of poor
John Keats, as "an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things,
crying to the universe, 'oh, that thou wert one great lump of sugar,
that I might suck thee!'"

ANONYMOUS

NOVELS FOR CHRISTMAS, 1837

[From _Fraser's Magazine_, January, 1838]

If[1] against the inroads of the evangelical party the orthodox church
has need of a defender, it hardly would wish, we should think, to be
assisted _tali auxilio_. Mrs. Trollope has not exactly the genius which
is best calculated to support the Church of England, or to argue upon so
grave a subject as that on which she has thought proper to write.

[1] _The Vicar of Wrexhill_. By Mrs. Trollope. London, 1837.

With a keen eye, a very sharp tongue, a firm belief, doubtless, in the
high church doctrines, and a decent reputation from the authorship of
half-a-dozen novels, or other light works, Mrs. Trollope determined on
no less an undertaking than to be the champion of oppressed Orthodoxy.
These are feeble arms for one who would engage in such a contest, but
our fair Mrs. Trollope trusted entirely in her own skill, and the weapon
with which she proposed to combat a strong party is no more nor less
than