MRS. GORE'S TALES.

MRS. GORE would have better consulted her reputation by sup- pressing these volumes; for they are obviously written on the spur of the moment, and display craft rather than art. The commonplace resources of every writer — romantic story, clap- trap incident, pretty sentiments, or sentimental reflections, with a free use of historical events or historical personages — are all pressed into service, and combined much after the fashion of

the better tales of Annuals and Magazines. It is true that the author of The Hamillons possesses far higher qualities than the common •herd of tale-writers,—a judgmenr. which enables her to deduce a moral from the scenes of history or life; a per- ception of character which gives feature and spirit to her com- monplaces; as well as playful satire, and ease and point in com- position. Still, these qualities are only accessories to good matter, and do not supply its place. What are sauce and garnish to the hungry, without the solid dish they should flavour or adorn ? This is our critical decision. The reader easily pleased, or the person jaded in mind or body, and who wishes to snatch brief amuse- ment without being tasked with a long spell of reading, will wel- come Mary Raymond and Other Tales. They are mostly short: they are very numerous, and very various. The scenes are laid in England—London and the provinces—in France, in Italy, in the Channel Islands, and in Spain; the times are of our own and of other ages; the characters of all classes—high, low, rich, and poor—from Napoleon, First Consul and Emperor, down to a worn- out veteran of the grande The tales of most mark in the volumes are " Pierre L'Ecre- vissier" and "Mary Raymond." The first is a story of the times coeval with the Revolution; and is distinguished for the nice and distinct manner in which it brings out some of the under-current causes which produced the hostility of the masses to the aris- tocracy, and almost excused their excesses. Mary Raymond is the tale of an orphan girl of small fortune, who is sacrificed by a marriage of convenience and the desire of her relations to get her og their hands. Of deep feelings, but of a placid, retiring dispo- sition, she attracts the notice of a middle-aged official, who has gradually risen to a post of trust and profit. Her poor and unde- clared lover absent—feeling herself' in the way of her uncle and his family—exposed to their neglect, and half ordered by her pro- tectors—she consents to become the wife of Mr. Merstham ; whose whole soul, if he has one, is bounded by his office, and who mea- sures his importance to the world by his own idea of his official rank. At first every thing is smooth and right ; but when the red-tapist pays a visit to the Raymonds at their country-seat, he is irritated at finding himself reduced to the level of his personal insignificance; the latent jealousy of his mean and narrow dispo- sition is aroused, by more attention being paid to his wife than to himself, as well as by a casual hint of her former attachment; and the green-eyed monster is fully developed by the sudden return of the first lover, grown unexpectedly rich. After this begins a scene of frantic watchfulness and jealousy, till it termi- nates in distress enough for a tragedy of the deepest dye.

So far as mere manners and social character go, " Nlary Ray- mond" may take its place beside the best sketches of Mrs. GORE. The situation of the heroine in the family of the Raymonds, both as

Mary and Mrs. Merstham, is capitally drawn, its well in the unde- signed insolence as in the subsequent friendliness. But Merstham, in his hard commonplace ideas—his innate vulgarity of soul— and the mill-horse nature of mind to which his office-habits have reduced him—is the chef-d'amwre. His first anger and suspicions are also well developed. But the passions seem beyond Mrs. GORE. The incapacity of attending to his official duties, and his angry resignation of his office, are hardly consistent with hIerstliam's character, or with nature: the power of discharging functions to which we have long been trained, perishes only with life. The frantic violence, outrages, and the final strangulation of his wife by Merstham, are alike inconsistent with the man and the times. The catastrophe was a life of wearing misery to both the parties to an unequal match, not murder and a madhouse.

As is our text, so shall be our extracts — limited to Mr. Merstham.

AN OFFICIAL'S SENSIBILITIES.

He saw Mary sit silently beside her work-table, evening after evening, while lie leisurely spelt over the Courier and the Standard—occasionally varying her occupation by threading a needle or snipping a bit of silk ; anti was eels- fed that all the pleasures of life lay comprehended fur his wife within that casket of satin-wood, refulgent with cut steel and mother-of-pearl. Ile laid it down as a rule, that, in the month of September, society is out of the question ; and that the theatres, even if supportable in their decadence, were incompatible with the lateness of Lis office hours ; which points being duly established, he hazarded no further remark on the subject 01 their imprisontisent in London, unless a Belf-eungratulation at finding his home of late so much embellished, and his time passing so cheerfully. &Dletsthaui Lavin attained Lis nine-and-thirtieth year, fur lam the ideal of life had wholly disc 'geared. He had made his own way in the world ; had fagged through twenty years of office life to his present satisfactory eminence; and, moderate in abilities but steady in prudence, bad conquered the regard of his superiors without incurring that perilous species of popularity the partisan. ship of his colleagues. Merstham had never in his life been branded with the onerous title of " the best fellow in the world." He was simply considered "a very safe man," or " very respectable man; " and when at length the death of his father, a country physician, placing him in possession of five.and- twenty thousand pounds, enabled hint to marry, his choice was determined to- wards Sir Charles Raymond's niece, rather by the unassuming discretion of her deportment than the prettiness of her person. " The days were gone when beauty bright his heart's chain wove." His chief care now was that his mutton should not be over-roasted, nor hia banker's accounts overdrawn, nor his house in Grosvenor Place carelessly swept or untidily garnished. lie wished his morrows to be as his yesterdays; the quarter-days of his landlord and tax-gatherer being duly balanced by those of that iron-fisted man the cashier of Isis Majesty's Treasury : and Mary Hay. mend was precisely the Eve he had dreamed of for his frozen Eden.

AN OFFICIAL IN TI1E COUNTRY.

Mertsham was a man altogether unbabituated to a country amuse life. Chained to Ida office, he fancied his arrival in the country must be a matter as important to other people as his departure from town to himself; and was surprised not to find the whole Raymond family assembled under the portico, or at least in the hall, to welcome hint to Warley. Others were arriving ou the same day, and he was disappointed at being only one of a large patty. His first appearance at the dinner-table elicited no sort of coininent; anti, as General and Mrs. Meredyth had quitted London the same morning as Merst. ham, it was to his old friend the General, a distinguished measlier of the Lower House, that Sir Charles Raymond applied fur political news and the rumours of the Clubs. Merstham was not conscious how narrow political dis. cessions appear in the mouth of a mere official man, or how vast and compre. bensive when expanding from the statesmatalike mind of a man of talent. He saw not that his were the politics of red tape and tin boxes—of Downing Street and Whitehall—of majorities and minorities; and that of the state of the country or the temper of the Continent he was as ignorant as a child. After dinner, too, instead of the evening paper and a doze in his easy chair, he found himself condemned to music, &art,:, and conversation, in a party comparatively strange to him. He was piqued and surprised to find himself of so little consequence; and to see his quiet Mary, his own particular wife, monopolized by her cousins; to listen to Mn.s Elwood's description of a gay bail she had given to the regiment of Lancers quartered at Weymouth, and give her opinion to Juliana and Helena respecting the costumes they were preparing

for their private theatricals. She had now been so many months assimilated with himself and his habits, that he bad forgotten the possibility of her assimilating better with those of her age and her own condition. But George Raymond, her eldest cousin, Charles the young soldier, and Richard the 'slid, now crowded round her chair ; and it occurred to Merstham, for the first time since his marriage, that there was a vast disproportion between his own still. life, solitary, drawing.rooms, and the populous vivacity of Worley. His de- ductions from the discovery were highly characteristic. " What noise, what confusion !" said be to himself, as he surveyed the gay assembly ; "and what a relief to poor Mrs. Merstham to escape from it all, to the tranquillity of Grosvenor Place!"

TILE OFFICIAL DISTURBED.

Had any one been sufficiently interested in a man like Merstham to note the changes of his demeanour, this alteration might have been sensible to all. As it was, the subordinates in his office observed that, heretofore, the most punc- tual and subservient of men, he was becoming absent in his manners, forgetful in his habits, and reckless in his tone. His servants discovered that be was " perplexed in the extreme," thought "nothing wherefore; " the footman wills. pered to the butler that things must be going on wrong with master, for he had twice forgot to wind up his watch and once left halt.a.crowu in his waistcoat- pocket ; and the butler decided in his turn that Mr. 31erstham had probably heard rumours of a run against his banker, or a reduction of a salary in his office. That any moral cause could operate against the peace of mind of such a person, seemed out of the question.

Unable to bestow our sympathy upon the woes of unamiable persons, we ac- Custom ourselves to doubt as well as disregard their existence. We allow the fox to be hunted to its end, and care not whether the intake be scotched or killed outright ; but

" The poor heed. that we tread upon 1st corporal sufferance feels a pang as great As when a giant sties ; "

and an intensely selfish man is not likely to survey the wreck of his personal happiness with less concern than oue who is lees an egotist. Merstham had, in fact, been as grievously deceived, and was as great a sufferer, as a man of generous nature. His whole life long had been devoted to the care of his own welfare ! Ile had fenced round his domestic comforts by every means that human foresight could devise : had secured a house that did not smoke, furni- ture of well-seasoned mahogany, a well-built carriage, and well.broken horses and servants. His property was insured, his fonds invested to yield him five per cent. when the rest of the world discontented itself with three ; and, last of all, with infinite searching and painstaking, he had appropriated to himself a wife likely to be as exclusively and submissively his own as his silver side-dishes or library-table; a wife to nurse him, when gout or rheumatism should arise, to do honour to his house on occasions of rare hospitality, and to be the mother of children rulecting trait for trait his lineaments and cha- racter, and destined to perpetuate his name and inherit the househoid treasures ou which he prided himself so dearly.

But what a change had overmastered the spirit of his dream !

The grateful, patient, passive wife—the joint stool, the porringer, the fretted garment intrinsically his own—was, after all, a revolted spirit ! She might seem to submit to his authority ; but her heart defied him—her feelings had escaped from durance ! Cold and reserved towards himself, her soil was bright with visions that he knew not of. While she smiled and submitted, he was doubtless an object of derision to her. His age, his person, his name, his house, his habits, were secretly despised by the insignificant being who, as a piece of suitable domestic furniture, had been appropriated to his use! In her judgments of the fashionable doings of the " world," Mrs. GORE has never displayed a much sterner morality than characterizes the class; but she has generally formed a sound conclusion as to the nature of other people's conduct. In some of the present tales she has deviated from the standard of right, and sunk into that quagmire a here crime is glossed over by sentiment, feeling, and fine phrases. It should be said, however, that her perception of the truth in nature, generally induces to trace guilt to its punishment.