498 Extracts from the Writings of a late Deceased Author.

DENS' THEOLOGY.

Is theology fit for the dens of beasts? Pride, priestly avarice, intolerance, cruelty, and folly dispute a claim in discussions fit only for Aristotle turned friar in his dotage, or Tristram Shandy sworn abbot of misrule. First for the best of the set and the most amusing; would not Rabelais split his sides to see a whole chapter in the fourth volume on the subject " of taking chocolate?" To eat chocolate is undoubtedly, it appears, to break a fast, but to drink it is not; or rather here the doctors disagree. Pope Benedict XIV. took it, but still decided, having finished his own cup and taken up his pen, that it was safer not to take it; in which opinion our worthy friend Dens agrees with one Billuart, when the question was proposed by Cozza and La Croiz. The objection by a supposed man of straw, who Dens sets up only, like Homer's sounding heroes, to knock on the head, is that liquids do not break a fast, except honey, milk, &c. But although an ounce of chocolate is a small nutriment, there are no small deadly sins, and chocolate can scarcely be called a liquid; and, though strong beer does not break a fast, yet beer, being merely an essence, cannot be considered as proving the objection; and that strong beer does not nourish is proved by the fact that those who drink beer without food become inebriated. It may have been abused, as the indulgence for eating flesh in Lent has, and Cozza sums up that although the drinking chocolate during a fast may have been allowed and tolerated, it was never thoroughly approved. A favourite amusement of the monastic fancy of St. Thomas Aquinas is to describe, in overstrained allegorical language, the mutual relations of the deadly sins, apparently taking the idea from the three daughters of the horseleech in Scripture, who cry continually "Give, give!" Thus luxury has eight daughters: blindness of heart, rashness, impatience, self-love, hatred of God, love of the present life, horror of the future; and the five daughters of gluttony are: vain pleasure, scurrility, ribaldry, babbling, and stupidity. It is these worthy but rather indefinite personages who fill the old moralities, gave rise to the revival of the drama in England, and filled our Elizabethan stage with such an inexhaustible series of ideal personifications. The learned chapters on the baptism of abortions would delight even the College of Surgeons, and to this is appended a discussion as to the things by which baptism may be performed; and with this extraordinary catalogue of their names: sea-water, rain-water, spring-water, rivery water, mineral-water hot or cold, wood-ashes, snow-water, puddle-waterdrippings from a roof. Some believe it to be valid in tea, broth, beer, or weak decoctions mixed with water, but not with bread, wine, milk, oil, gravy, tears, urine, unmelted snow, or rose-water. The logic of what constitutes deadly sin would puzzle the Common Pleas.

We have another learned but, as Pierce Egan said of Bulwer's "Paul Clifford," a very superficial chapter on the oaths of all nations, which we the more wonder at as Billingsgate and Rome have always lain near together.

It appears that small thefts are not mortal sins, but that a groat over a certain sum falls into this enormity.

RECENT NOVELS.

CHARLES STANLY.*

WEAK, vain, unstable, Charles Stanly! your fortune and your fate are well depicted. Your only virtue, according to simple, honest, manly Frank Tyrrell, was that you could appreciate the excellence of Isabella Romayne; your unmerited good fortune was to be beloved, and the natural result, to be unworthy of her. But Charles has his apologetic points of view: it would be the ruin of any youth of gentle blood to be brought up by so fair a coquette and so volatile a wife as the Lady Ramsay; and if at the last he was himself changeable enough to prefer Chloe Rodostomus to Isabella, we really cannot help thinking he was in the right. Chloe, with her wonderful spirits, her energy of life, her beauty and vivacity, wins all our affections, and carries with her all our sympathies. Isabella is a great deal too grand, too fastidious, and too shadowy. If she leans. against the mantelpiece, a pale sunbeam, studded with prismatic drops, plays as a halo round her brow, enhancing the spiritual character of her statue-like beauty. When Isabella loves, she does not speak, but a rich crimson glow, like a sunbeam imprisoned in alabaster, suffuses her face and throat; and when the same wonderful being is thwarted, a sad smile, like a pale sunbeam in a watery sky, gleams through her tearful eyes, and sighs deep and low, as the last long vibration of broken chords, break from her!

Charles Stanly is, however, the hero of at once an earnest, simple, and well-told story. Our wayward youth is perpetually badgered by a rich old uncle, Lord Overdale, who is ultimately won over, by becoming himself a victim to Chloe's charming wiles. He is protected by a beautiful, clever young woman, wife to a titled invalid, and with whom the connexion assumes so tender a character as to lead to scenes in which the author has, with a skill rare among modern novelists, gone to the verge, without overstepping the bounds of the chastest delicacy.

Our hero rather fancies than really loves the beauteous Isabella, who for his sake abandons the staid and prudent Frank Tyrrell; but to whom she as quietly returns, when, after four years duresse, the worldly Charles exchanges from Isabella to her sister Chloe. Poor Chloe, she by a meré mistake is poisoned by her mother's eye-lotion, and the spoilt child of fashion has, with exceeding poetic justice, after dallying at the feet of clever, pretty Lady Ramsay, of beauteous, haughty Isabella, and of fair, bright, and loveable Chloe, to put up with a creole for a wife! And what mothers have not these fair ladies? Mrs. Tyrrell is an admirable sketch, and Madame Rodostomus quite unrivalled. The great point of this novel is that all its characters are natural, and, therefore, excellent; all its incidents are such as occur in every-day life, and, therefore, genuine. There is no diffuseness, no pseudo-philosophic disquisitions, no rodomon

*Charles Stanly. A Novel. By the Author of "Ninfa." 3 vols. Chapman and Hall.

tade; all is clear, compact, and concise. There is plenty of wisdom, but it does not impede the progress of the narrative; there are rich and abundant descriptions of persons and things, yet do they never interfere with the evolving of events and the legitimate dénouement of the story.

COUNTERPARTS; OR, THE CROSS OF LOVE.*

THE reader would hardly expeet from so innocent a title an erudite work on the nice point whether in love and marriage the doctrine of the homœopaths, like to like; or that of the allopaths, contraria contraris, holds good. The explanation of counterpart, adopted from Coleridge, is "two forms that differ in order to correspond." And the theory adopted and illustrated by the author is, that people of different temperaments and of distinct magnetic or biological conditions are more adapted to "love" than those of similar conditions; which, as in the similar poles of the magnet, mutually repel one another. This is all allopath and orthodox, but how it is further connected with the hereditary superiority of the Hebrew race, it would take us some time to show: suffice it that the author has cleverly and amusingly illustrated his learned thesis; sometimes, however, with more regard to the principle to be worked out from the biological hypothesis upon which he starts than to the principle of a correct morality, as in the instance of the amiable Bernard being put out of the way merely that his charming counterpart, his wife, may fall to the lot of Doctor Sarona. Such are the sequences which inevitably flow from a preference to vain theories and hypotheses to the great moral truths which ought to guide us here below.

TILBURY NOGO; OR, PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF AN
UNSUCCESSFUL MAN+

THE very title of this book speaks of its rollicking, laughable, sportsman-like character. The disasters which attend upon youthful vanity, when backed by sufficient supplies-it directs its pitiful energies to the field and the turf, and its sympathies to jockeys and black-legs-have long been a legitimate subject for caricature; but we doubt if even in the pages of Hood (or Hook they have been more amusingly portrayed, or worked out with so much detail and completeness as by the author of the last "Unsuccessful Man."

Counterparts; or, the Cross of Love. By the Author of "Charles Auchester." Smith, Elder, and Co.

† Tilbury Nogo; or, Passages in the Life of an Unsuccessful Man. By the Author of "Digby Grand." 2 vols. Chapman and Hall.

END OF VOL. CI.

C. WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND.