CURRENT LITERATURE.
Young Brown ; or, the Law of Inheritance. By the Author of "The Member for Paris." 3 vols. (Smith and Elder.)—The author replies in a preface to adverse criticisms which were passed on his novel as it appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, bat replies, we think, with more vehemence than success. He defends his choice of a subject, a subject which may be briefly described as the profligacy of a great noble, with its results, and he defends it with arguments which are ludicrously inconsistent. The writer, he tells us, must not be a more amuser, he must he a teacher. As a teacher, he must not be prohibited from topics which furnish him with most impressive lessons. We thoroughly agree with the proposition. But when he goes on to say that this prohibition would have deprived us of all sorts of great classical masterpieces, he is adopting a very different argument. "Anacreon," he says, would not have written "his Odes,' Virgil his Bucolics,' Ovid his ' Pesti,' Tibullus and Propertius their 'Elegies,' Horace, Juvenal, and Martial their 'Satires,' &c." Juvenal and Horace excepted, none of the other writers mentioned can possibly be considered as teachers, so far as concerns the subject in question. We never heard of Martial's "Satires," but is there anything of a higher purpose to be discerned in the brutal licence which disgraces so many of his epigrams ? Is there anything didactic in the few unhappy passages where the ideas of a corrupt age disfigure the pure pages of Virgil, in the loose effusions of the pseudo-Anacreon, in the erotic poems of the Roman writers of elegy, in the De Arte Amandi of Ovid, for instance,—for the Fasti, one or two obscene passages excepted, have nothing to do withthe question ? Or does the writer simply mean to say that we should have missed a great deal of elegance if great writers had not been licentious ? If he does, we shall not condescend to argue the point. When he asserts that "a general lowering of the tone of morality, public and private, taffies with the period when journalists and novelists were first tied down to the inexus.ble law 'of saying nothing to scare people," we can scarcely think he ia serious. No such law certainly is kept. Every other novel we see is occupied with this very theme of illicit love. But putting this question aside, we cannot praise either the literary execution or the tone of Young Brown. The plot is extravagantly improbable ; of this, at the risk of disgusting our readers, we shall give them the means of judging. One Duke of Coarthope marries a girl after the Scotch fashion, and deserts her; she gives birth to a daughter, who is brought up at an inn. Her the next Duke, supposed to be the son of the first, but really a supposititious child, happening to be belated at this inn, seduces. The girl marries a rustic lover in time to conceal her disgrace, and "Young Brown" is her son. Rash and reckless judgments on men and things abound. India was governed by the Company in an utterly base and selfish way. England is no better, for it is really in the power of a few corrupt officials. "Our regiments were and still perhaps are, the habitual refuge of the worst kind of criminals." The novel has merits; the last volume exhibits them especially, but on the whole, it does little credit to the writer, or to the magazine which introduced it to the world.
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