was she not habitually isolated and taciturn? They might have fancied that she was, as usual, gnawing her bone in an attic, in greedy expectation of the next Monday, which was to augment her balance at the bank. No friendly hand touched her knocker. No child or sister cared for her existence. But at length a tenant sent for two brass taps which, with the customary instinct of miserdom, she had delayed providing for the water-butts in one of her own houses, Then was it discovered that her corpse lay stark in an upper room, in the midst of documents relating to her property. In all likelihood some one well acquainted with her character and means had called, had followed her up stairs, had stunned her as she entered her apartment, and had completed his work of murder as she lay senseless in the doorway."

belong to slop-shop literature, to do them justice, they lies, dead, her skull crushed in, her blood staining the floor, her treasure despoiled, and from Monday to Friday, we may presume, her resemble in their effects a grand display of fireworks. Another most common manifestation of slop-shop litera-body remains undiscovered. Why should the neighbours wonder? ture is "graphic writing." Until the trick was discovered, it was considered very wonderful; but now its secret is known, it is practised by all. The commonest account of a fire is now embellished with parodies of those descriptive | touches which have made the literary fortune of " our own correspondent" in different parts of the world. The atmospheric aspects of fire are enlarged upon; the flames are said to lick the adjoining houses; a picture is made of the firemen in the ring; the sparks are played with in what is called "a happy vein of fancy;" the gray distant spire of some church is picked out, and described under the new colours thrown upon its surface; and, altogether, the old style of "penny-alining" is put to the blush. The representative of the new school throws about his similes with a lavish hand, and rather thinks himself an unappreciated genius. Like a boy who has been sitting for years on the banks of the stream of literature watching the swimmers, he falls in, and is surprised to learn how easy it is to float like his fellows.

If Mr. Dickens can boast of many imitators, Mr. Thackeray numbers almost as many, and the imitations are openly carried into the lowest works of the hour. A novel is now being issued in penny weekly numbers which is thus boldly advertised on its own cover. It is called The Woman with the Yellow Hair.

"This most powerful fiction, from the pen of the FIRST COиIO AUTHOR and most picturesque essayist of the day, is wonderfully quaint and eccentric in its humour, philosophical in its satire, and deeply affecting in its pathos. The writer so nearly reLIFE, that his anonymous articles in the principal journals of the sembles DICKENS and THACKERAY, in his sketches of LONDON day have frequently been attributed to those authors.

The companion of "graphic writing" in slop-shop literature is "forcible writing," and this is now so general that it has descended to Catnach and his compeers. The beauties of English composition are no longer confined to our great literary works; they adorn the meanest catch-penny publication that issues from the press. The occupation of "Jem Ward," the well-known "one-eyed patterer," and all the distinguished bards of Seven Dials, must assuredly be gone, when sketches like the following are issued by a White-fit for the entertainment of prim BOARDING-SCHOOL MISSES, chapel printer and publisher:

:

THE MYSTERIOUS MURDER OF AN OLD MISER LADY AT STEPNEY. "All readers of romance are familiar with the ideal of a miser. It is an aged, attenuated, yellow anatomy, who lives like a grub in a cheerless house, and ultimately dies, either crouching on a heap of gold, or leering into a chest full of mortgage deeds, or is murdered by burglars. The late Mr. James took hold of the idea, and produced Mr. Scarves, who dwelt in solitude with his golden-haired daughter, until fear compelled him to employ a servitor with a knotted stick to watch and guard the dismal but opulent habitation. All the misers upon record have exhibited the same characteristics. Their secretiveness is equal to their penury; they love to see and touch their hoarded wealth; they disdain all pride except that emptiest pride of riches, as if in the whole of Vanity Fair there were a booth more loathsome, more wicked, more hateful than that of the miser. They wear the meanest apparel; they eat the most sordid food; they patch a broken pane of glass with brown paper; they are hard in their bargains, and relentless in the despotism of their extortion; and, generally, as though under some dread retributive law, their ends are ignominious and miserable. Thou fool! this night thy life shall be required of thee! That doom is recorded against the misers one and all. They live in expectation of a day which never comes, and they die unhallowed deaths. The most degraded and desperate of men dog their footsteps; robbery is for ever on their thresholds; they are envied by the very miscreants to whom blood is not sacred, and innumerable have been the instances in which they have perished under an assassin's hand amid the glut of their unfructifying lucre. These remarks apply especially to the fearful event at Stepney. Mrs. Emsley, the dust-contractor's widow, was the shabbiest Dives of East London. Her fortune was splendid. She was proprietor, it is believed, of not less than from eight hundred to a thousand houses, chiefly let to the poor, from whom she exacted her rents with rapacious punctuality.

She was old and litigious; she lived solitary, without even a servant. A poor charwoman cleansed her abode every Saturday. Her collecting day was Monday, when she sallied forth with a strong-pocketed apron like that of a toll-collecter, to receive her due, which, next morning, was deposited in the bank. There it lay, unblessed and worthless, accumulating from one week to another, but of no human value, except in the imagination of the insatiable widow. For how did she enjoy her possessions? By leaving her kindred miserably poor; by eating scraps of fly-blown meat haggled for after regular business hours at the butchers' shops; by sustaining her existence upon garbage and water, while she lurked, like a spider in its web, or a wolf in its den, perpetually famished, and waiting for the regular Monday prowl. Then the flies were caught, and the sheep devoured, and the Old Woman of Stepney went back to her haunt, to gloat over heaps of notes and coin, and to indulge in the malignant misery "Suddenly her solitude is broken upon. Murder enters her house, and she is struck down amid her mortgage deeds, agreements, securities, and all the dusty addenda of wealth. There she

of self-starvation.

"The present work, by the fearlessness of its language, and its utter defiance of all those powerful conventionalities which have cramped and fettered modern novelists, making their books but threatens to revolutionize the world of novel writing, and shows that there still remains in our time some of that strength and vigour which of yore characterized the GIANTS OF LITERATURE. "The object of the author in this story is to unmask VICE and HYPOCRISY in every rank of society; to depict life as it really is, and expose in all their ghastly deformity the fearful cankers gnawing at the heart of civilization, which a FALSE PRUDERY would gloss over and ignore."

The following is a taste of its Thackerayian quality :

'CHAPTER THE FOURTH.-'THOSE CREATURES!' "To the Haymarket!' The Haymarket, where midnight is noonday, where roses are carmine,-where there is much drinking but little thirst,-where the same faces pass and repass each other every night, and all night long, with the same threadbare badinage, the same senseless joke, the same dreary, weary smirk on the thin cracked lips.

"It has gone twelve,-put up your shutters, respectable tradesman! Get you home, honest people! Stop your ears, Pity! Turn away your head, Mercy! Clench your hand, Charity! We are among the outcasts,-'the ulcers and incubuses of society,'the rouged and ragged, flaunting, tawdry,-pretty faced and tastefully dressed;-in short, among those creatures!' and we are come to find your husband, madam, your brother, or your son, whichever it is that you have been sitting up for so patiently these many hours. Be of good cheer, dear lady, he is in right merry company, and in no hurry to get home to you. Be not hard upon him when he comes in; you know he has a sufficiency of your society any day, and he is now amongst such jolly fellows, and such pretty women. Ay! They will be pretty, you know, some of them, with their audaciously bold faces, much prettier than you are. Besides, you know, boys will be boys, and the good world smiles not unkindly upon their innocent gambolling."

This kind of slop-shop literature can be produced in any quantity, and, bad as it is, it appears to sell. Our railway bookstalls are largely supplied with such material, not in the periodical form, but bound up as gaudy books. It is a comfort to know that bookselling at railway stations is almost extinct, for it has done little more than support the slop-shop literature of its own creation. The gamboge covers of such literature have generally been in harmony with the contents of the volumes they brought so unpleasingly before the eye. The days of Bubble and Squeak, by Ernest Maltravers, and Mr. Collywobbles's Confessions of a Bagman, by the author of Mixed Pickles, with a host of similar volumes with similar titles are happily numbered. Such books belong preeminently to slop-shop literature, are issued by slop-shop publishers, and were bought by slop-shop readers. Their crackling covers fell to pieces in the hand in the course of a six hours' journey, and no library shelf was ever enriched by the addition of such ragged mockeries. A few old bookstalls

AN AUSTRALIAN BOOK-STORE.

upon the line, an egg-chest crammed full of twopenny and lately landed from shipboard; huge boxes of light and English classics, -an odd volume of the Spectator,-of heavy literature. This is the reservoir which feeds the Cibber,-of anybody of the last century, would have fur- overflowing streams of books which circulate below. Each nished far more nourishing travelling refreshment to the case must necessarily remind you of dear old mother-country, British public than all such indigestible collections of literary for to each have the custom-house officials in London or JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD. Liverpool attached a portion of that precious red-tape, which pastry. is at once the symbol and the strangulating cord of British administration. A box from Murray's or Routledge's is wanted. Duly labelled, and placed so as to be easily acces. A SAUNTERER in Eastcheap or Cannon-street, or in any other sible, it is at once seized upon, and is made to disgorge its mul. similar thoroughfare of the metropolis, would not be sur-tifarious contents upon a large table, situated conveniently in prised to learn that the bales of goods which he saw being the centre of the room. The manager of the country trade swung by heavy cranes from the windows of great warehouses makes his selection, then the superintendent of the town into lumbering waggons were intended for the Australian supply, and each bear off their share of the spoils down market. Let him stroll down Paternoster-row, however, and stairs, where they are re-packed and despatched to their be told that the boxes of books and magazines blocking the various destinations. The rest are put in stock on the second pavement were for the same destination, and he would or ground floor, as occasion requires, a sample being predoubtless stare. The common notion is that our Australian served for the inspection of the proprietor, who has a little colonies consume only pickaxes, shot, guns, jack-boots, room devoted to the purpose. Thus all confusion is avoided, tobacco, spirits, bead-necklaces for the natives, and ribbons and a few moments will at any time suffice for ascertaining for the women; and that few books ever land at Sydney or the quantity on hand of any particular description of stock. Melbourne except thumbed Pickwicks and odd volumes of Let us now descend to the first floor. At first sight we Sir Walter Scott's novels, with perhaps a gross or two of might readily imagine that we have entered the principal spelling-books occasionally. This idea, however, like many room of a public library. The sides are substantially shelved, others relating to our colonies which obtain in the popular and thousands of volumes are reposing on them, not arranged mind in this country, is a mistaken one. The Australians, with reference either to their authors or their titles, but to notwithstanding the continual excitement to which they are the names of the publishers by whom they are issued. This subjected by the ceaseless discovery of fresh gold-fields, are a is the wholesale department, where provincial storekeepers or reading and a book-loving people. A description of one of chapmen come to make their selection. The activity which their great "book-stores,' as they call booksellers' shops, you observe among the assistants engaged on either side of which we have just received from a friend at Melbourne, the long central counter, this gathering together of works of furnishes abundant evidence of this fact. the most heterogeneous character, from the severely orthodox publications of Mr. Hatchard to the vigorously heterodox books emanating from Mr. Chapman's, this amicable collocation of Ruskin and Mrs. Rundell, of John Stuart Mill and the Little Warbler, of Rawlinson's Herodotus and Goody Two Shoes, or Thomas Carlyle and the Dairyman's Daughter, is being carried on in the execution of country orders. "I should like to follow some of these parcels," writes our informant, "to their destination. Fancy the arrival of a bulky package of new books, in the dusk of the evening, at a squatter's station on the Murrumbidgee. It is borne triumphantly into the drawing-room (we have drawing-rooms in the Bush, sir), and Fanny claps her soft little hands, and her bright eyes dilate with joy as the lid is wrenched off, the zine lifted up, the brown paper removed, and the books extricated from their cavernous resting-place. Nothing I should like better than to seat myself beside her, in an easy chair, this chilly evening, toast my toes at the huge wood fire, and listen to Fanny reading aloud one of the Idylls of the King, or a chapter of Framley Parsonage, or a bit of the Woman in White."

Walking down Paternoster-row and crossing Ave Marialane you come to Amen Corner. In an office on the first floor of one of the three or four houses which are all that the Corner contains, sits the representative in this country of George Robertson, the great bookseller of Melbourne. He is a pleasant man, but with the firm manner common to those who have "roughed it" in the colonies. His duty it is to purchase, for the establishment at Melbourne, new books as they are published; and when a book is being "subscribed," or offered around to the bookselling trade, he often signs the name of George Robertson for a larger number of copies than either Longman or Simpkin, the fathers of our book-market, care to run the risk of purchasing.

This Mr. Robertson is a native of the Emerald Isle. Like many other enterprising men, he left this country to push his fortune in a thriving colony. He believed that an industrious people must, sooner or later, want books, both in order to inform themselves and to occupy their leisure. He judged correctly. Commencing business in an insignificant cabin, he now occupies a handsome building, as capacious as any of the first-class London wholesale establishments." Our Melbourne friend's long letter enables us to present a few interesting details respecting this great "book-store."

66

As you enter at the principal entrance you may notice the initials of the successful founder carved on the threshold, after the cave canem fashion of the Pompeians. Passing in, you observe eleven airy-looking yet substantial iron columns, of colonial manufacture, ending in ornamental capitals," supporting the story above. A similar arrangement will be noticed on the first floor. These give an elegant and graceful appearance to the two main business rooms, each 120 feet in length. The "rough" and the ready" are generally supposed to characterize the fittings of colonial warehouses. Not so here; the greatest care has been bestowed on the furniture of these capacious bookrooms. The ceilings,-a wise precaution in this country of bad plaster, are panelled throughout. A handsome staircase, which, it appears, has hitherto been a rather uncommon ornament of Melbourne architecture,--all sorts of ladder contrivances, from a rope upwards, figuring in the old warehouses, -leads us to the top of the building, whence, although we are in almost the lowest part of the city, a fine view is obtain able. While we are up here we may see how the book-trade is managed in Australia.

We find this elevated story full of cases, as yet unopened,

Our friend, who wrote in July, the middle of the Australian winter, goes on to assure us that Dickens and Thackeray, Scott and Fielding, Charlotte Bronté and Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and Charles Lever, Hollingshead and Moy Thomas, Anthony Trollope and Miss Muloch, are as popular there as in the mother country, and meet with equally general acceptance, and quite as intelligent appreciation. Nothing cements the friendship of the colonies for Old England more than the reading of similar books, causing the mind to run in the same grooves of thought and fancy. The Colonial-office should keep this fact in mind, and remove every obstruction that stands in the way of a cheap and quick book-post, together with those ridiculous excise regu. lations which hamper the exportation of English books. But our task is to describe, not to legislate. Let us hastan down stairs to the retail department. Here we find the appointments of the best description. A catalogue of the immense stock,-itself a goodly volume,-in which appear "the names, weights, and colours," or rather the titles, sizes, and prices of all the readable, and of a vast number of the unreadable, books published in England and elsewhere during the last five "lustres," is handed to you. The books on the shelves, in various bindings of cloth, calf, and morocco, are all regularly classified, and you are at liberty to roam at large, unquestioned and unpersecuted, without being re

was erected after a plan suggested by the proprietor himself. From 60,000, to 70,000 volumes are generally on sale, valued at about £25,000. This is not the only monument of Mr. Robertson's enterprise. He has just opened a branch establishment at Sydney. It will be interesting to the literateurs and publishers of this country to learn that this great book depository does not stand alone in Melbourne, but that there are at least a score of other booksellers there, many of them transacting an extensive business.

Those who have hitherto looked upon our cousins in Australia as a nation of rough people, engaged earnestly enough in digging gold, or in the more pastoral avocation of watching sheep, but careless of education and literature, may now change their opinion. If such "book-stores Mr. Robertson's indicate anything, it is that our friends at the Antipodes are at least as good customers to popular writers as we are.

as

quested to purchase this or that. A medical man walking into the shop can at once put his hand upon the modest vade mecum, or the elaborate Copland, as his appetite for professional knowledge is more or less ravenous. So, too, the divine, if he be polemically given, can pounce in a moment upon Dwight, of Yale College; if apocalyptically, upon Dr. Cumming, who has a whole page to himself in the catalogue; if argumentatively, upon Butler and Pearson; and, if trustfully and piously, upon Doddridge and Wilberforce. The historical student here finds his Hallam or Mahon without difficulty; the scholar his Liddell or Scott, or his Yonge; the mathematician his De Morgan, or Whewell; the artist his Ruskin; the musician his Cameron, or Novello; the theatrical critic his Schlegel; the poet in posse almost any Pierian spring he may wish to take a draught from; the idle man the last new novel or magazine; and little boys and girls an inexhaustible mine of highlyilluminated stories of every degree of interest and improbability. Books of reference abound, so that "answers to cor- MR. ALBERT SMITH'S "WILD OATS AND DEAD respondents" become the simplest task in the world; and LEAVES."* the weekly essay-writer, rather shy in his Latin,-your heb- WHEN I say that the perusal of this posthumous book of Mr. domadal scribblers seldom venture upon Greek,-gets his Albert Smith's has made me very sad, I must utterly disquotation as pat and handy as if he had been really in the claim any of that whining sympathy for persons of the literary habit of reading its ruthlessly-plundered and frequently-profession which is now-a-days so rife, more especially when mutilated author. Cheap light literature is stowed away its object is deceased. It needs but the death of a literary here literally by the ton, and school-books of every descrip- man to call forth a host of his literary brethren to tell how tion by the hundred-weight, but all in such a manner that great a man he was, how unappreciated, how singularly five minutes need not elapse between an order and its com- virtuous; there is no blot on his 'scutcheon, no baser metal pletion. "Parlour," "Railway," "Standard," "Popular," to mix with that superfine auriferous extract with which his "Run and Read," and a dozen other "libraries" are stored name is to be emblazoned. Taking the laudation in inverse in the ample shelves, or wasting their sweetness in vast ratio, you,—if you could learn the truth of the matter,-would unopened cases, but all regularly ticketed and easily get-at- frequently find the much-be-praised object to have been a able. But while the prevailing appetite for light reading man with genius above the average, and morality deci must be ministered to, there are here bulky tomes enough dedly below it; in many cases without commercial honesty, to satisfy even the veriest bookworm. At an hour's notice with no notion or intention of paying his way or leaving proa university library could be packed up, or the materials vision for his family, and in nine cases out of ten with a selected for stocking a Kiandra cheap novel-shop, nor would tendency to debt, drink, and dirt. It is a fashion among such an agreeable order cause a hiatus in the catalogue, second-rate young literary men of the present day to be for as in Shelley's world,"Bohemians," that is to say, to pass their days as dirty-handed pot-wallopers and tap-room frequenters; earning money when their gin-racked brains are in condition to allow them to do so,-borrowing of cleanly-living acquaintances when they are not; marrying sometimes, and having children, but making nurses of their wives and beggars of their children, and living the squalidest, the wretchedest, the sickest, the most disreputable of lives. Even men of this class find, not merely their apologists, but their stalwart champions, writers of their own stamp, who come forward in prose and verse, and twaddle and lie about them, trusting that they themselves shall receive such coronachs when drams and drabs have done their work; but I, the writer of this notice, have neither Bohemian genius nor Bohemian tastes, and the subject of my article certainly possessed none of those attributes so winning in Bohemian eyes.

"Nothing in the store is single."

Seated in a polished pulpit near the principal entrance to the store is Mr. Robertson, the man who, solely by his own invincible perseverance and industry, has created this temple of the muses,-as singular old Lackington delighted to call his huge book shop in Finsbury. From this stand, by means of speaking tubes, he directs the business of the place, and can readily discern the various customers as they flock in,-now a provincial storekeeper, then a clergyman, or a schoolmaster, anon a squatter, who is about to lay in his winter's supply of miscellaneous reading. A mail-steamer has just come in, and we may see the newest of new works, moist, fresh and odorous of printers' ink, from Piccadilly, the Strand, Fleet-street, and the "Row." Mr. Robertson informs us that their "magazine day" is only eight weeks after ours; and some day it will be only four. It is remarkable that those English counties which contain great bodies of dissenters, as Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cornwall, give forth more emigrants than the church-going districts. Such shires as Kent, Hampshire, Cambridge, and Oxford contribute but few families who care to seek their fortunes in distant settlements. The first settlers in New England were the Puritan Fathers, and there appears to be some element in dissent which predisposes to wandering, and the seeking for wider fields of industrial action. We express surprise at the preponderance of works of a dissenting or evangelical character upon Mr. Robertson's shelves. He informs us that nearly a moiety of the books which annually pass through his hands are those which are issued by "serious" publishers. We then pass out at yon door opposite, the entrance for the hawkers, and colporteurs, and such "small deer," who penetrate the thinly inhabited districts, and carry to the hut of the shepherd, the tent of the splitter, the wayside public-house, and the lonely farm, the orange-covered novel which beguiles the leisure of men cut off from social intercourse, and from access to any other recreation,-except, perhaps, the bottle.

The sadness which I feel, and which will be felt by all those who knew the writer of this book, is that its perusal brings him before us as he was in his best days, in all his riotous spirits and glorious health and fervid imagination; that, reading, we are carried back into the scenes where the con-. versations took place or the suggestions were made which originated many of the papers included in the collection, that the thought then suddenly strikes upon us that we ourselves are considerably more mature and less spirited than in those days, and, worst of all, that our friend's bright career is ended, and that he is lost to us for ever!

When I say his best days, I speak advisedly, for better, a thousand times better and happier, was the time when he was struggling and living by his pen, when

"The modest wants of every day

The toil of every day supplied," than the period when the Mont Blanc entertainment brought him simultaneously a fortune and a heap of care. His career was a self-worked and a prosperous one, and each step in it can be easily traced in his successive writings. He began life as the assistant in his father's medical practice at Chertsey,

The cost of this noble book-repository was £8,000; and it• Wild Oats and Dead Leaves. By ALBERT SMITH. London: Chapman and Hall.

and never worked harder than in this capacity. He would often refer to this as the dreariest period in his existence, and declared that the wretchedness of the life depicted in his sketch, "The Country Medical Man," was not in the least exaggerated. While thus engaged he wrote his first paper of any length, "A Rencontre with the Brigands," a well-told description of an adventure which had actually occurred to him in the previous year. He sent the manuscript to Bentley's Miscellany, and it was accepted. He had previously sent a few lucubrations to the Mirror, a publication of those days, edited by Mr. John Timbs, the now well-known antiquary; and then, beginning to feel that he possessed the faculty of writing for the press, he determined upon quitting the profession which he loathed, and trying his luck in London as an author. He was to supplement his income by practising as a dentist,-a branch of surgery the choice of which cannot be explained, inasmuch as he was a Middlesex Hospital prizeman and an able practical proficient in midwifery, and an experienced and reliable general practitioner. Dentist, however, he became, and a brass plate announced the fact to such of the London public as travelled through Percy-street, Tottenham Courtroad; but dentist he did not long remain. The pen began to make its way, and among its first work was its employment on Punch, not the sedate Conservative old gentleman who now oscillates between solemn sententiousness and feeble punning, but this old wag in his youthful days, a riotous, reckless, personal blade. Jerrold, Henry Grattan, W. H. Wills, and Lemon were the writers, and Leech was the artist, a young man then beginning life, drawing coarsely and roughly, but even then exhibiting rare appreciation of character and strength of hand. Rising talent was looked after by the Punch proprietary then, and Albert Smith's aid was eagerly welcomed. To their columns he contributed two regular weekly serials, the Physiology of the London Medical Student" and the "Natural History of Evening Parties," besides various short paragraphs in prose and verse. But the connexion did not last long; Albert Smith never seemed to know the exact cause of severance, but he and his colleagues disagreed and parted.

aspects of life which had dawned upon him in his new novel. The success of Ledbury had gained a reputation to its author, and his acquaintance was sought in those circles where talent is a better passport than rank or riches. Amongst other societies thrown open to him, that of the green-room was not the least attractive. He began to write for the Lyceum Theatre (then under the management of Mr. and Mrs. Keeley), and was a constant attendant behind the scenes of that and all other principal metropolitan theatres; and thus you will find that most of the scenes in his next novel, the Scattergood Family, all those that are good in fact, are laid amongst theatrical people and show folk. The influence his life had on his writings can now be traced throughout. His theatrical experience dictated the Ballet Girl; his about-town life, the Gent and the Idler on Town; and his sketches of a higher class of society, in which he was afterwards so fond of indulging, first appeared in the Flirt. For by this time he was a known and recognised wit, a distinguished member of the "amusing classes," and as such was welcomed at social gatherings, and specially at dull country houses and other resorts where society dooms its votaries to pass the autumn. His vanity was, naturally enough, somewhat tickled by these invitations, and henceforward guardsmen and foreign office swells took the place of the medical students and the bank clerks in his pages; while the pretty girls of his own order made way for Lady Adelas with stately walks, and Marguerites with perfumed tresses, and Belle de Nuit with tiny hands which Houbigant could not fit, and many more fictitious personages, who talked queer French and had curious ways, and were as much like life as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's. Albert Smith had a quick and a rare perception of character, and I never knew him fail in its delineation save in these instances, but here he was overcome and blinded by his heroine-worship. At the same time it is but just to say that he invariably looked upon these acquaintances in their proper light; that he never for an instant condescended to pander to their prejudices or forget his own dignity, and that he invariably expressed himself as infinitely happier in the congenial society of two or three literary friends than in the most aristocratic company.

He used to say that this was the best thing that ever happened to him, the turning point of his career; for had he conThis posthumous republication does not do him anything tinued in his engagement, enjoying a good position and a like justice, and, strange to say, what he seems from his preface sufficient salary, he might have lost the ambition of becoming to have feared, the articles have a certain rococo and bygone anything better; but no sooner had he taken the tie, than he smack. The little sketches read like what they are,-inagafelt the necessity of making his own way, and winning the zine articles of ten and fifteen years ago; the public has been game off his own bat. I need scarcely say that his old asso-surfeited with better things since then, and these are decidedly ciates were not too ready to help him; but theirs was at not up to the Household Words standard either in subject or least no active opposition; the staff of Punch has always been execution. Nevertheless they have a quaint dry humour, and composed of gentlemen who, in their literary capacity at least, show a perception of London character and an appreciation have shown themselves incapable of mean actions, and they of the ridiculous which I now find in no writing save that of merely quietly pooh-poohed him, but this he could easily bear. Mr. Dickens. The volume is well printed, cheap, and in a He had reverted to his old friend Bentley's Miscellany, to portable form, and will doubtless have a large sale; but it is which he contributed a few sketches of London life, the prin- to be hoped that no one unfamiliar with Albert Smith's cipal actor in which was a certain Mr. Ledbury. These writings will judge of them from these specimens; which are became so immediately popular, that Mr. Bentley sent for the in fact merely what are called "pot-boilers," articles written young author, and asked him if he could not make Ledbury for money-making purposes in the intervals of graver labour, the hero of a novel, working in the sketches he had already and no more criterions of what was in his nature than are the written, continuing them from month to month, and con- Sketches by Boz of Mr. Dickens's literary powers. necting the whole with a framework of interest. This Albert Smith engaged to do, and this he did with a success which, while most gratifying to him, thoroughly satisfied his publisher, who made terms with him for another novel, to be commenced in the Miscellany immediately on the completion of Ledbury.

You will have perceived that in his work hitherto he has been merely drawing on his own early experience of life. The medical student whose physiology he wrote was himself, and most of the scenes therein depicted had occurred to him and his fellow-students. Mr. Ledbury (one of his friends at the Middlesex was known as Ledbury, from the name of the town whence he came)-Mr. Ledbury and all his friends were people in the author's own position in life; Clumpley, the country village, was studied from Chertsey, his native place; and Jack Johnson's experiences at the Clerkenwell doctor's were founded on the bona fide adventures of one of Mr. Smith's most intimate friends. He now entered into a fresh phase of existence, and immediately made use of the new

But I come back to my starting-point, that their perasal has made me sad, because it has reminded me of days never to come again, spent with one of my dearest friends, a kindhearted, genial man of warm impulses and generous tendencies. I never heard him say a really bitter word of any one; I have known him go out of his way a hundred times to say a kind word for, or give a helping hand to, a young man beginning a literary life; his foibles were few and immaterial, his virtues were many and great. Mine is no unmeaning testimony; for years I knew him in strictest intimacy, and his loss has left a blank in my heart which I do not expect ever to fill.

EASY LAW.*

EDMUND YATES.

1

OCT. 1860.]

LITERATURE, THE SCIENCES, AND THE ARTS.

my writing with that modesty which is the grace and ornament of true learning. I am forty-five years of age, have had what is considered a tolerable education, and have acquired some amount of general knowledge; but only the other day it would, I suppose, have been difficult to find a person more ignorant of the spirit and principles of English property law. Thanks, however, to Lord St. Leonards' Handy-Book, recently published, the stigma is removed. Snatched hastily from the stall as the railway bell was ringing, in the mistaken but fortunate belief that my handy-book was something of a facetious nature, I was induced to read. Forthwith all mystery and perplexity melted away. Imagine the man of property, of whatever kind, as the natural enemy of the laws, the enemy for whom innumerable shoals and rocks and shallows are artificially laid out and carefully concealed,-the enemy who, without your raising a finger with any particular intent against him, must sooner or later come to shipwreck, and cast rich spoils upon the sands of equity and law, and everything becomes easy. Thenceforward for the reader, at least, all is plain sailing; and the study, if he happens to have no property himself, becomes pleasant and exciting.

tell how, I dare say, as an Englishman, you will have a confused notion of having heard something like it before. The fact is, that one deals in law and the other in equity. Now these are from one point of view the same thing, and from another point of view quite a different thing. Both consist of customary or unwritten law, and statutory or written law; but then the law of the one is not the law of the other, but quite different, and frequently contradictory. "It must sound "that on one side of Westminster Hall a man shall recover an oddly to a foreigner," as my noble and learned master remarks, estate without argument, on account of the clearness of his title, and that on the other side of the hall his adversary shall, with equal facility, recover back the estate." And there is no doubt it might sound oddly, but what of that? Liberty of the press may sound oddly, habeas corpus may sound oddly, any one of the stipulations of Magna Charta or the clauses of the Bill of Rights may sound oddly; and, besides, who that has got over the strangeness of the thing can help admitting the wise economy of space which enables roof, in the same hall? Legislative attempts have been made the whole proceeding to be completed under the same broad system (my instructor's I suppose that any simple ignorant man, such as with to reconcile these two things and make them one,-to subshame I confess myself so recently to have been, would have vert the system of administering in "different forums" this a pretty clear notion of what he meant by saying that his "splendid and comprehensive " neighbour was worth ten thousand pounds. He would not, words), but they have failed in England. I say in England, of course, fancy that his neighbour's body could be disposed because I am informed that the spirit of wild license which of for that sum, nor that his neighbour was necessarily pos- has prevailed in the United States since their celebrated and sessed of that money in bright sovereigns or notes of the successful struggle for independence, has not spared even this Bank of England. It would be enough for him that he pos- sacred thing. No sooner was the last of King George's sessed property of that value. You would have a hard matter troops departed, than the cherished distinction was wantonly to make him perceive your drift if you asked him in what destroyed. Across the Atlantic, judges sitting on the bench the value referred to consisted. He would very likely think may to this hour be seen administering both law and equity; that whether it was ten thousand pounds' worth of bricks, or and the winning of estates on one side of a hall and losing ten thousand pounds' worth of land, or the same value of them on the other is there for ever struck out of the list of government stocks, or sacks of corn, or carts and horses, or the national sports. How much more they have lost in this gold or silver plate, or anything else, it was all the same. He way I do not know; but my Handy-Book gives me a hint or would no more think of an essential difference between one two. In England, I learn that from the different rules of law thing that would fetch ten thousand pounds and another thing and equity it frequently happens that both courts are resorted that would fetch ten thousand pounds, as far as the money to with relation to the same contract. Suppose that you wealth was concerned, than of a difference between the had bought an estate of Tompson, and the agreement was weights of a pound of feathers and a pound of lead. Here, to be performed by a day named, and that he had made out then, if such a man should, in ignorant or wilful opposition his title, and was ready to convey to you at the time, but your to the spirit of English law, endeavour by prudence and fru. money was not ready, or you would not pay. Well, this gality to become a man of property to that amount, it is a might no doubt be a grievous fact for Tompson. If he had hundred to one but the legal wreckers would quickly find him known you would not pay he might have found some one high and dry and on his beam ends. For first of all to puzzle else who would. Your failure may have been inconvenient. him there is the grand legal distinction or distribution of It may have prevented his taking up a little bill, and brought property into land and all other things. The first sort of him to insolvency and dishonour, insomuch that his purpose property they call "real;" and you would suppose that govern being defeated, he might not care about selling his property. ment stocks, sacks of corn, carts and horses, gold and silver So it might, and if it did there is a court of law to which plate, and other things, were in the legal mind values wholly Tompson may go, where he may issue a writ, and get it fictitious and conventional. But no; the law skilfully evades served, and wait for his adversary to enter an appearance; the declaration of a positive opinion on this point. Such and then Tompson may file a declaration, which may call 'So be it," again by a surrejoinder; afterwards Tompson may be things are personal property. As a man of property, then, forth a replication, which may be met by a rejoinder, and you are possessed of real or personal, or both. says the unlearned man, and so until lately should I myself bothered by summonses ordering him to come up to a judge's most probably have said. Call it what you will, you cannot chambers, and show cause why his adversary should not have hurt me by your names and distinctions. Ha! ha! try it. time to plead, which may throw him over the long vacation; We are done, and briefs prepared, and all ready for Tompson to Cherish the opinion that it does not matter, or keep it lying and when his adversary has pleaded, and a dozen other things dormant in your mind, and see how you will get on. lawyers ask no better. When the ship is stranded, and the rush into one side of Westminster Hall and claim his clear cargo, as yet scarcely damaged, is cast about within low undoubted common law right, then his adversary suddenly water mark of the great manor of the law, then, and then determines to pay the money. I suppose you think that he only, do all nice distinctions vanish;-then, and then only, is goes then directly to the same side of the hall where Tompson all property as one. Show me,-show any other gentleman has been operating, and depositing his bags of gold under the learned in the law,-that there is any sort of property which nose of the court, offers to repair all damage done, and comcannot be made available when necessary for the payment of plete his contract, upon which all shake hands, and the carried to the cheesemonger's. Not at all. Tompson's advercosts of suit, and we will grant you there is something matter is ended, the suit cut short, and the briefs and papers sary scrupulously avoids that side to which Tompson has resorted, and opens his counter-trench from a moderate distance. Equity, not law, is the thing for him. He goes into court,-a totally different court to where Tompson is,-and states his case on sheets of paper and skins of parchment, and in a way which fifty Handy-Books would not make Tompson quite un derstand; and he prays for an injunction to stop Tompson's operations altogether; whereupon equity would order Tomp

rong.

Unlearned in the law, as I suppose you to be, you are no doubt well aware that there is such a thing as a Common Law Court, and such a thing as a Chancery Court; and, unaccustomed as you are to make nice distinctions, I will warrant you regard them as only two legal and rival shops, as they are traditionally said to have once been, fiercely competing and cruelly underselling one another, but both dealing in the same article,-namely, law. You are mistaken, and when I