Her Majesty's Tower
By . Second Series. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott & Co.
WHEN the First Series of these sketches came to our hand, we tried to give the reader some notion of their badness ; but we had to lament secretly that the well-meant endeavor was more or less a failure. In the present case it would be worse than useless to renew the attempt, and we shall merely commend the book in general terms as a model of nearly everything that is to be shunned in literature. It might be constantly used as a book of reference, with undoubted profit; the young author, when he suspects himself of sinning against good taste, sincerity, and honest workmanship, turning to Mr. Dixon’s writings as a glass in which to behold the ugliness of his fault, that he may instantly amend it. For example, if he writes out of the emptiness or turbidness of his brain some odious piece of swashbucklering description, let him read Mr. Dixon until he comes to such a passage as this : “ Like his father, and like his comrade Raleigh, Grey vowed his sword to the Good Old Cause ; and while he was yet in his teens he crossed into the Low Countries to finish his education in the trench and field. The Dutch received him with open arms, and in the front of every charge his countrymen saw with pride the trail of his crimson plume. Grey brought into the patriots’ camp not only a soldier’s sword, but a statesman’s thought; not only a dauntless eye, but a clear and resolute mind. He knew not merely how to fight, but how to turn the tide of battle to a righteous end. He saw what should be done, and how it should be done. Nursed on the passions which breathe in the Faery Queen, the legend of his house, he loathed Grantorto with all his soul, and spurned the Idol as he would have spurned the nether fiend.” Having applied himself to the study of such a passage, it is not credible that the literary apprentice will ever care to do anything like it; and it is as little probable that he will fail to be ashamed of any similar appetite in himsell when he sees how long Mr. Dixon likes to keep a coarse or rank savor in his mouth : “Clara Isabel, on the day of her arrival, swore by her saints that she would enter Ostend before she changed her chemise ; and that chemise had grown from white to yellow, and from yellow to black, yet Isabel had not entered the place yet”; or when he notes how often this author contrives to allude to some guilty intrigue, how he plainly loves to be speaking of “ slums ” and “ stews,” how every honest woman’s beauty seems to come soiled from his admiration, and how every light woman’s lightness is dwelt upon. The tyro may also learn from this book that to paint a bloody scene with gore does not heighten its horror, though it makes the painter very unpleasant; that to speak of former times, and to lug in nicknames of historical people does not prove deep acquaintance with history, as the use of poor little bits of archaic quaintness fails to restore any idea of the past and its life ; that a short sentence can be as empty and pointless as a long one, and that the equivalent of the steam-whistle employed in literary expression fails at last to excite deep emotion in the reader. He can discover from Mr. Dixon that a knack of doing things is not a desirable accomplishment; he may come even to suspect that literature is a high and noble vocation which chooses its followers and is not a trade — except in its merest externals — to be learnt; and he may be warned in time not to go on till he finds himself as the sum of his efforts producing something so vulgarly artificial and ineffectual as “ Her Majesty’s Tower.”