A book, by a clever writer, though of a bad school and in a bad style. The "late Secretary of Legation" belongs to the dandy class of writers : a set who (with pen in hand) affect to be " blasé " and indif- ferent to all sublunary or superlunary things, (though excessively sensi- tive, by the by, to-criticism) ; strive to give profundity to commonplaces and novelty to what is trite by sounding phrases expressed with a conse- quential air ; "sport" philosophy by seizing a scientific principle in an enoyclopeedia or catechism and disguising it in -their own diction ; and think they make themselves "distinguished" by talking of great men and fashionable people in a manner combining the superior and the familiar. Disraeli and Bulwer have the credit of originating the school, in Vivian Grey and Pelham; but we think it came to us partly (the more glittering part from the French) through Colburu's writers in the New Monthly, at the time when that eminent bibliopole was working his fictions of -the-" silver -fork " school. The fact, however, de- pends upon a chronology which no one has compiled ; and the pedigree of the effete or the departing is not worth the trouble of investigation.
