Again, a dandy of fifty is presented to us, whose affection for his ward has waited, of course, till she is wedded to another, to ripen into love. He still continues her protector against the advances of others; for jealousy is a good point of character in every one but the husband, and there it is only ridiculous. The husband in this case is another admirable specimen of the results of wedlock for life--he is a chattering, shallow pretender--a political economist, prodigiously dull and infinitely conceited--an exaggerated type of the Hume-Bowring statesman--and, as is naturally to be expected, our sympathies are awakened for the wretched wife, and we rejoice to see that her beauty and talents, her fine mind and pure ideas, are appreciated by a dashing young fellow, who outwits our original friend the dandy of fifty and the philosophical deputé; the whole leaving a pleasing impression on the reader's mind from the conviction that the heroine is no longer neglected.
From the similarity of these stories--and they are only taken at random from a great number--it will be seen that the spirit of almost all of them is the same. But when we go lower in the scale, and leave the class of philosophic novels, we find their tales of life and manners still more absurd in their total untrueness than the others were hateful in their design. There is a novel just now appearing in one of the most widely-circulated of the Parisian papers, so grotesquely overdone, that if it had been meant for a caricature of the worst parts of our own hulk-and-gallows authors, it would have been very much admired; but meant to be serious, powerful, harrowing, and all the rest of it, it is a most curious exhibition of a nation's taste and a writer's audacity. The _Mysteries of Paris_, by Eugene Sue, has been dragging its slow length along for a long time, and gives no sign of getting nearer its denouement than when it began. A sovereign prince is the hero--his own daughter, whom he has disowned, the heroine; and the tale commences by his fighting a man on the street, and taking a fancy to his unknown child, who is the inhabitant of one of the lowest dens in the St Giles' of Paris! The other _dramatis personæ_ are convicts, receivers of stolen goods, murderers, intriguers of all ranks--the aforesaid prince, sometimes in the disguise of a workman, sometimes of a pickpocket, acting the part of a providence among them, rewarding the good and punishing the guilty. The English personages are the Countess Sarah McGregor--the lawful wife of the prince--her brother Tom, and Sir Walter Murph, Esquire. These are all jostled, and crowded, and pushed, and flurried--first in flash kens, where the language is slang; then in country farms, and then in halls and palaces--and so intermixed and confused, that the clearest head gets puzzled with the entanglements of the story; and confusion gets worse confounded as the farrago proceeds. How M. Sue will manage ever to come to a close is an enigma to us; and we shall wait with some impatience to see how he will distribute his poetic justice, when he can't get his puppets to move another step. Horror seems the great ingredient in the present literary fare of France, and in the _Mystères de Paris_ the most confirmed glutton of such delicacies may sup full of them. In the midst of such depraved and revolting exhibitions, it is a sort of satisfaction, though not of the loftiest kind, to turn to the coarse fun and ludicrous descriptions of Paul de Kock. And, after all, our friend Paul has not many more sins than coarseness and buffoonery to answer for. As to his attempting, of set purpose, to corrupt people's morals, it never entered into his head. He does not know what morals are; they never form any part of his idea of manners or character. If a good man comes in his way, he looks at him with a strange kind of unacquaintance that almost rises into respect; but he is certainly more affectionate, and on far better terms, with men about town--amative hairdressers, flirting grisettes, and the whole genus, male and female, of the epiciers. It would no doubt be an improvement if the facetious Paul could believe in the existence of an honest woman; but such women as come in his way he describes to the life. A ball in a dancing-master's private room up six pairs of stairs, a pic-nic to one of the suburbs, a dinner at a restaurateur's, or a family consultation on a proposal of marriage, are far more in Paul's way than tales of open horror or silk-and-satin depravity. One is only sorry, in the midst of so much gaiety and good-humour, to stumble on some scene or sentiment that gives on the inclination to throw the book in the fire, or start, like Cæsar, on the top of the diligence to pull the author's ears.