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ART. VIII. Guy Livingstone, or Thorough. Second Edition. London: 1858.

GUY LIVINGSTONE is rather a favourable specimen of a class of books which are one of the most characteristic literary products of the present day. It is not a work of art, nor is it a novel with a moral, nor is it a satire, nor a sporting story, though it belongs in some degree to each of these subdivisions of the prolific genus of fiction. An anonymous writer thinks it well to invent a character whose works and ways, and general view of life, he puts before the world, with a sort of tacit request to be informed what the world thinks of such a personage. It is a little difficult to say what is the exact meaning and value of such a proceeding. To some extent, no doubt, the author must be taken to endorse his hero's views, for the mere fact of excogitating and publishing them to the world, gives them a currency which they would not otherwise enjoy; but we are left in the dark as to the real extent of this resemblance, and, as in photographic portraits, there is a scowl on the features which is essentially untrue. The author has always a perfect right to turn round on his reader with the assertion, that he had no intention of recommending his hero either for imitation, or even for sympathy. He may say, as Lord Byron constantly did say,-My Corsairs' and Giaours' do not embody my own views. I am a poet and a peer, amusing myself with literature. and caring nothing for the moral fitness of things. But in truth such pleas are merely evasive. All fictions, unless they are composed in an artistic spirit as rare as it is in many respects excellent, have a direct moral, and do, in fact, produce moral results on those who read them. To read an elaborate account of a person's life and conversation, specifying his feelings and motives, is very like associating with him for a certain time; and it is hard to imagine any theory of authorship on which less responsibility attaches to the author of such a work, than that which belongs to a man who, being better acquainted than any one else with the character and conduct of another, introduces him to all his friends, and takes great trouble to make them intimate with him. If the person so introduced is a gambler, a blackleg, and a bully, the introducer would be condemned for his conduct, even though he might himself be the most irreproachable of mankind. It is, perhaps, the fairest and the most convenient method of dealing with such cases, to leave the author entirely out of consideration, to accept, for the time

being, the events and persons described as real, to discuss their character upon that supposition, and to leave the author to draw his own conclusions as to the degree in which he himself has been made the subject of praise or blame.

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The story of Guy Livingstone is short. He is a young man of considerable wealth and enormous personal strength, which is accompanied with that grimness and ferocity of disposition which has of late years excited so much effeminate admiration. The early part of the book is occupied in stripping him for the ring and showing his postures. We are introduced to his 'enor'mous frame, square and stedfast as the keep of a castle,' though lean in the flanks as a wolf-hound'-a comparison, by the way, which in these days it is not very easy to appreciate. Moreover, he had a set sternness about the lips and lower jaw,' and altogether the face of one of those stone crusaders who look up at us from their couches in the Round Church of the Temple.' We never read of this sort of hero without a wish that we could put a whole batch of them into some convenient arena and leave them to fight it out. Would Brian de Bois Guilbert be a match for Lara? If Dandie Dinmont met Dirk Hatteraick, which would have the best of it? Would Rodolphe, the prince in disguise in the Mystères de Paris,' with his muscles of steel under a skin of velvet,' have got the better of Livingstone's sinewy arms,' and which of them all could cope with the mighty Comte de Monte Christo? Livingstone, to be sure, crumpled up a silver cup in his hand, which was all fibre and sinew like an oak-bough;' but then Dantés, after being, we forget how many years, in a loathsome dungeon, bent a chisel into the shape of a horse-shoe and straightened it out again a feat, by the way, which speaks ill for the steel, whatever it proves as to the muscle.

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After justifying his pitiless sternness' and other heroic properties, by thrashing a prize-fighter and performing some similar exploits, Livingstone entertains a circle of guests at his ancestral hall-Kerton Manor in Northamptonshire, a sort of temple of grimness. There had dwelt Colonel Livingstone, the hero's father, who, being mortally wounded, smote his assailant to such purpose that his helmet was cut in twain down to the cheek strap; there, too, had lived several other persons, all of whose portraits were remarkable for the same expression ' of sternness and decision about the lips and lower part of the 'face:' to wit, Beau Livingstone of the Court of Queen Anne, Prior Bernard, the friend of the great Earl of Warwick, and Sir Malise, surnamed Poing-de-fer,' who helped to storm Ascalon. It is rather unlucky that in ancient times people

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were far less romantic than they are now. "If Sir Malise really was called Poing-de-fer,' it is probable that he owed his name not to a particularly strong arm, but to having lost his hand and supplied its place with an iron hook. The circle of friends collected at this stern abode comprised Mr. Forrester, a dandy life-guardsman, Miss Raymond, with whom he is in love, Miss Flora Bellasys, a voluptuous beauty, and Mr. Hammond, a gentleman in delicate health, who tells the story and is Livingstone's intimate friend. To them enters a certain unromantic Mr. John Bruce, a Scotchman, who is engaged to Miss Raymond, and who, though he has a good deal of strength, has no activity and does not care for field sports. The other members of the party hospitably try to make him as uncomfortable as they can, and after a time Mr. Forrester and Miss Raymond elope together, being furnished with money for that purpose by Livingstone.

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Before this event takes place Mr. Hammond goes to Ireland, where he falls in with a second edition of Livingstone, one Ralph Mohun, who is even more ferocious than his friend, and very nearly as strong, though his strength is principally illustrated by the fact that when attacked in his house in Tipperary, his bushy beard bristled with rage;' and when he had occasion to knock a man down in Paris, the grey hair bristled round his savage face like a wild boar's at bay.' In early life Mohun had run away with a married woman, who died of a broken heart, with that lovely and pious composure which such persons usually show in novels.. Inheriting an estate in Ireland, he becomes the terror and horror of the place, butchering a considerable number of rapparees, who make an attack upon his house, with a brutal ferocity which his biographer seems to take singular pleasure in describing. At the house of this savage brute Mr. Hammond hears of Forrester's elopement with Miss Raymond, and of Guy Livingstone's engagement to one Constance Brandon, a young lady of exquisite beauty, and of very high church principles and ascetic habits. Guy, as might have been expected, is rather strong meat for Constance, especially as he has a weakness for flirting with her lovely and extremely voluptuous rival, Flora Bellasys. One unlucky evening a ball takes place, at which Guy, Constance, and Flora are all present. Guy had been dining at the mess of his old regiment. I guessed from the unusual brilliancy of his eyes, and from 'the slight additional flush on his brown cheeks, that the wassail

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*Ordericus Vitalis tells a story of a monk surnamed 'De manu 'ferreâ ;' which title he gained from the circumstance, that having had his hand cut off for an atrocious crime, he wore a hook instead of it.

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had been deep.' As policemen say, he was not drunk, but had been drinking. In this state of things he waltzes with Flora, and takes her into the conservatory to cool herself The fiery Livingstone blood, heated sevenfold by wine and 'passion, was surging through his veins like molten iron.' He takes a tempting opportunity of kissing his partner, who enjoys being kissed, and has the additional satisfaction of being seen in that situation by Miss Constance Brandon, at which that young lady is so much disgusted that she casts off her lover on the spot, and, the light dies in her eyes, and the colour in her cheeks, never to return to either again till she shall wake on 'the Resurrection morning.' Hammond finds Guy next day in a very dogged frame of mind, about to start for the Continent, where, in the company of Ralph Mohun, he passes the winter in constant debauchery and gambling. Constance pines away, and ultimately dies of consumption. On her death-bed she writes to Guy twice to recall him: Flora intercepts the first letter, the second brings him to her bedside in time to see her once more. An affecting scene takes place, the gist of which is, that she tells him she thinks he will die before long, and gets him to promise not to marry Flora. He goes home in a brain fever; whilst he is convalescent Flora comes to see him, whereupon he swears a great oath that he will never forgive her, nor see her again, if he can help it. I thought,' says Mr. Hammond and think still, that he erred on the side of harshness.' We are inclined to think so too; why need he kick her down stairs? After his recovery, Guy goes abroad to Italy, but he is an altered man. A lazzarone is impudent: but the old hardness of heart was wearing away.' 'Livingstone only lifted him by the throat and held him suspended against the wall, as you may see the ' children in those parts pin the lizards in a forked stick. Then ' he let him drop unhurt, but green with terror.' Shortly afterwards he actually condescended to save the lives of some boatmen in the Bay of Naples, whom he took on board his yacht to avoid a white squall. You will say that this was only an act of common humanity,' observes his biographer. If you had 'known the man you would have thought, as I did, that the ' words of her who was an angel then, were bearing fruit already -crab apples at best. In Italy are the Forresters, and one evening Mr. Forrester is barbarously murdered by Bruce, his rival; Guy tracks him down, and he goes mad with remorse and terror, after making a full confession. Guy thereon returns to England in company with the widow, and the whole melancholy party return to Kerton, where one morning the hero riding his enormous horse Axeine-a brute edition of himself

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gets a fall. Axeine rolls on him, and crushes his spine, and after some weeks of horrible torture, grimly endured, he dies, and Miss Brandon's prophecy is accomplished.

Such is the story. Its general tone, as our readers will have observed, is a sort of glorification of strength and ferocity. Mr. Hammond reverences Guy, and more than half excuses Mohun, in consideration of their gifts in these particulars. We shall have a few words to say upon the doctrine immediately; but we are bound in fairness to observe, in the meantime, that the execution of the story is very good indeed. It is long since we have seen a better written novel. It is short, terse, and nervous; the composition is remarkably careful and scholarlike; and it is enlivened by vigorous epigrammatic wit. The character of Flora Bellasys is excellently sustained, and some of the scenes are drawn with great power. We may refer, in particular, to a quarrel between Colonel Mohun and one Horace Levinge, a Jew debauchee, which leads to a duel, in which Levinge is killed, and to the confession made by Bruce of Forrester's murder. We have seldom read anything more horrible, yet it is neither disgusting nor unmanly. The author has a great taste for classical quotations; and the influence of the kind of education which they imply is sufficiently well marked throughout the whole book; but he has learnt from Mr. Thackeray the unpleasant trick of looking at classical characters from an essentially modern point of view. It is not unamusing to criticise pius Æneas according to the canons of that contempt for respectability which so largely influences all modern novelists; but that is not the way to understand Virgil.

The moral aspect of Guy Livingstone is of more interest than its literary merits. It does not, it is true, represent any particular school of thought or feeling; but it is one of the straws which show characteristically enough the set of that great body of undefined sentiment, which forms so important an element in the incoherent mass collectively known as public opinion. As we have already observed, a novel may be considered as a sort of indirect request by the author to the readers for sympathy, generally for admiration; and the questions suggested by the work before us are such as these: Was not Guy Livingstone a fine fellow? Was he not a very impressive and wonderful person, showing, whatever might be his faults, the inherent raciness and vigour of the stock from which he sprung? Is he not, at any rate, a very model of strength and sternness both of mind and body? Is it not a magnificent thing to be so stern and so strong? Such is the prevailing spirit of the book;

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