so pungent, the canvas is far less crowded, and the subject is distant and unfamiliar; and, may be, its excellences will not help it to a very large public.

The Spectator,

Nov. 6, 1852.

"MY NOVEL.

OR, VARIETIES OF ENGLISH LIFE."

MR. CAXTON junior has, he informs us, written his novel with the twofold purpose of making up the deficit in his annual income caused by the repeal of the Corn-laws, and of doing his part to counteract the effect of incendiary publications, by exhibiting the rural aristocracy, and generally the richer classes, in a truer and kindlier light than that which is thrown upon them by the dark lantern of Socialist, Radical, or Free-trade Diogenes. The second title of the work implies even a broader and more philosophic purpose. For while every English novel must represent varieties of English life, that which assumes to do this in a special sense must be intended to display the relations of one part of our social fabric to another, and to trace a wise design, a unity of aim, a complex harmony, in the whole

made up of these varieties. The first of Mr. Caxton's objects have doubtless been obtained; the other has not been accomplished either in its wider or its narrower sense. Mr. Caxton does not specify the dangerous works to which his own is designed to be an antidote; and he remarks in the course of it that it is easier to live down than to write down inflammatory class appeals. We are rejoiced to agree with him, that a kind-hearted sensible squire and a good parson are likely to do more in the reconcilement of classes than any books which he can write; and the more, because he seems not to have mastered the first element of success in his undertaking a knowledge of the mischief to be encountered, and of the causes which have produced it. It is not generally supposed that Socialist schemes or democratic rhetoric have found their way very extensively to the intellect and passions of the agricultural poor in England; nor, so far as landowners and parsons have been the objects of invective, has want of kindliness and benevolence been the vice attributed to them. Cordial good-nature and a frank dignity are the popular attributes of the "good old English gentleman"; and had such qualities been sufficient to prevent what is called, by a rhetorical exaggeration, in this country at least, "the war of

classes," that war would never have broken out. But, unfortunately, these very country gentlemen66 our territorial aristocracy," as Mr. Disraeli is fond of calling them—with all their virtues, had a natural tendency to high rents; and being in possession at one time of paramount legislative power, they passed laws which gave them artificially high rents at the expense of the rest of the community. This is the origin of what was certainly a combat between classes; but that is over now. How far English landowners have forgotten that property has its duties as well as its rights and enjoyments, is quite another question; and if Mr. Caxton wishes to go into it, he will find that fancy-portraits of a model squire and a model parson are but dust in the balance against the facts represented by the words rural pauperism, rural ignorance, and rural brutality. If he wants to know as he seems to have rather a Pall Mall notion of country life-what these words mean, let him consult Sidney Godolphin Osborne and Charles Kingsley, who are both gentlemen and parsons working among the agricultural poor.

Granted that a goodnatured squire, with eight thousand acres of land, arable and pasture, and not a mortgage on it, aided by a parson with a decent income-or even one who can give to the "res

angusta domi" the dignity that high character, good manners, and intellectual accomplishments, will bestow -may do great things for a parish. The sagacious Mrs. Glasse prefaces her receipt for hare-soup by the pithy direction, first catch your hare. So, we say, first put your unencumbered well-meaning squire and your phoenix parson in every parish in England, or in the majority of parishes, and then will be time enough to discuss what good may be got out of them. It is the burdened estates preventing improvement, and the parsons careless, sauntering, often with little more intellectual cultivation and much less practical knowledge and good sense than their farmers these are the things that constitute the circumstances with which we have to deal in too many of our country parishes, and which have borne fruit in the fearful triad the consideration of which we recommended to Mr. Caxton's notice.

But our novelist does not seem to know what to do with his squire and parson when he has found. or invented them. A considerable vagueness as to the daily life, business, enjoyments, and manners of an English village, must have come over the mind of Pisistratus while he was in Australia making the fortune which he, not prescient of Free-trade iniquities, was rash enough to invest in Uncle Rowland's acres ;

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