rist and a writer of deep feeling rests. If the struggles and difficulties of this writer were published, we doubt not they would form a good companion picture to Goldsmith's experiences, as illustrating the trials of a poor Irish author in this century, just as Goldsmith's life gives us the career of one in the last.

he

But Carleton has been a fortunate man. A few years ago received a public pension of £200 for his literary services, and immediately on acquiring this independence he emigrated to America, taking his farewell of Great Britain with furious exclamations, in verse, against her "ingratitude." It ever is so. Abuse the Irish peasant, swear at him, beat him, cover him with contumely, and he is ready to allow you to be the most ginerous-hearted gintleman alive, but do him a substantial service and he will ever after regard you as a tyrant and natural inimy. We doubt not that if Carleton had not received his £200 per annum, he would have died in poverty, without ever having regarded himself as the victim of national ingratitude.

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ERSITA DI

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↑ ODERNA

CHORLEY (H. F.)

ALTHOUGH Mr. Chorley is more especially known as a musical critic, and a journalist of the very first class, we cannot afford to omit his name from our necessarily imperfect list of living novelists. His "Sketches of a Seaport Town" appeared in 1834, and they were followed in 1835 by "Conti the Discarded," and in 1845 by Pomfret; or, Public Opinion and Private Judgment." He also is the author of Memorials of Mrs. Hemans," Authors of England," "Modern German Music," and "Music and Manners in France and Germany."

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M. C. CLARKE.-R. COBBOLD, M.A. (REV.)

MARY COWDEN CLARKE.

341

THIS lady, a daughter of Mr. Vincent Novello, was born in 1809, and married in 1828 Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, who is illustrious for his friendships with Lamb, Hazlitt, and Keats. Amongst women she will ever be remarkable, and by admirers of Shakspeare she will ever be respected, for the persevering energy with which she devoted sixteen years of her life to the composition of her "Complete Concordance to Shakspeare." Besides this great task, for which her principal reward we are afraid will be unsubstantial commendation, she published in 1848, "The Adventures of Kit Bam, Mariner;" in 1850, "The Girlhood of Shakspeare's Heroines;" and in 1854, a novel of no ordinary merit, entitled "The Iron Cousin."

RICHARD COBBOLD, M.A. (REV.)

THIS very zealous and kind-hearted clergyman, a native of Ipswich, Suffolk, amongst the traders of which populous and wealthy borough his family have for many years been of importance, is a voluminous and well-meaning writer. He made, we believe, his first appearance as an author thirty years ago, when he published "Valentine Verses," a collection of rhymes and doggrel that were well enough to please a circle of friends in private, but became eminently absurd when offered as an intellectual entertainment to the public. Since that time, Mr. Cobbold has frequently committed himself to the care of publishers, and the tender mercies of critics; so that the list of his productions, in sermons, poems, lectures, and novels, is a long one. His best novel is "The History of Margaret Catchpole; a Suffolk Tale." It is needless to say that the heroine of this

story, was no creation of the author's imagination; in Suffolk she loved her smuggler, scrubbed her bricks, and stole a horse. We should say that Australia could furnish many histories similar to her adventurous one; of the multitudes of young women who made their acquaintance with that country through being sent to the penal settlements, there must be many who have married respectably, and done well, after the termination of their periods of punishment. Still the incidents in the career of Margaret Catchpole were striking and offered an admirable field for the display of a novelist's ingenuity, and Mr. Cobbold made such good use of his materials, that he produced a story, entertaining and impressive, notwithstanding many defects which are attributable rather to the author's imagination, than to his historic fidelity. Compared with "Paul Clifford,” Eugene Aram," and other equally famous biographies of culprits, it is a tedious, but perfectly innocuous book.

Since the appearance of "Margaret Catchpole," Mr. Cobbold has favoured the world with the "History of Mary Ann Wellington," "Courtland," "Freston Tower," "Zenon the Martyr" &c. &c., but these later novels have not sustained the reputation which the history of the "Suffolk Girl" procured for him.

HENRY COKE (THE HON.)

Ir is long since men and women of rank began to dabble in authorship, but it is a feature peculiar to the present generation, its being deemed respectable and honourable in them to do so. When the members of the beau monde, first condescended to gratify their vanity by displaying their wit, or want of it, in print, they almost invariably shrouded themselves under some polite fiction of writing to amuse their

own immediate friends, or to form the manners of a beloved son, or else they indemnified themselves for their sense of degradation in using the quill like "the herd of beggarly scribblers," by showering angry impertinences and vulgar contempt on all who were authors by profession--that is for a livelihood. Horace Walpole could never allude to a man of letters sustaining himself by his pen without an expression of disdain. The conduct of the patrons of literature to authors is well exemplified by the neglect and subsequent recognition of Johnson by Lord Chesterfield. Lady Mary Wortley Montague classed hackney writers in the same category with hackney coachmen. And Byron, who at the commencement of his career, had scruples of dignity about receiving money from his publisher, lost much, as Major Pendennis reminded his nephew, in the estimation of society by mixing himself up with literary

men.

But now all that is changed. It is generally felt in the highest and most exclusive circles that the reputation of being able to write a smart book, or tell a clever story, is about the best possible trinket, the most graceful plume, with which to adorn wealth and noble lineage. The number of noble or aristocratic authors is daily increasing; season after season they publish their trips to the Mediterranean, missionary excursions to the Pope, pilgrimages to Jerusalem, rambles through the back-woods of Australia, journeyings over Canadian wilds, yacht-voyages in all latitudes, and three-volume novels. Some of these writers are men, some ladies; but fair and stalwart alike, they are proud to avow their connection with the guild of bookmakers-and to measure their sport and prowess by the number of royal heads, stamped on good current gold, that they have bagged.

A title is a great thing to go into the bookmarket with. To a writer of fashionable novels-a depictor of high life

upstairs-it is an invaluable possession. The author who can write Lord before his name on the title page is sure of a sale for his work; the presence of that brief word in that spot is worth more than Dukes and Earls sprinkled broadcast through the rest of the volumes; it is a guarantee that the descriptions of high life are genuine, a surety that since the imperious countess in the book says to the family solicitor-"now that this business is transacted, you are at liberty to withdraw "--imperious countesses in May-fair and Belgravian palaces, and in moated castles of feudal antiquity, do really and truly so address their legal advisers. Whereas when we take up plain Mr. Brown's or simple Mr. Robinson's novel, what security have we (the public) that some ignoble plebeian charlatan (audaciously thinking that at heart and in the marrow of their natures, a merchant's wife and a peer's lady are much alike, and that they make love, intrigue, quarrel with their husbands, bully their children, run in debt, and squabble with their friends much in one and the same fashion) is not passing off upon us the miserable ambitions and airs of his trumpery connections, (in fact, connections no better than our own) as those of distinguished, and illustrious, and noble-not to say royal— circles? Mary-le-bone loves a lord, and when it goes to Mudie's it has preference for a lord's book over a commoner's, and rightly too, for if the book is a good one, Mary-le-bone (who is really a very intelligent creature) is agreeably surprised, and if it is nonsense, as every now and then by some accident a noble author's book is, still is it not a lord's nonsense, and of the best style of insipidity? and in reading it does not Mary-le-bone get a taste of May-fair?

Of the many gentlemen, members of aristocratic families, who from time to time present the world with a book that can never be said to be really forgotten because it is never altogether heard of, the Honourable Henry Coke is a favourite specimen. In any previous age his novels would