The author of _Alton Locke_ is at least no vulgar theorist, though a warm imagination and great enthusiasm have led him occasionally to appear most vague and theoretical. He has had recourse to fiction, as the most agreeable, and probably the most efficacious mode of bringing his peculiar social views under the notice of the public; but in doing so, he has fallen into an error very common with recent novelists, who have undertaken to depict certain phases of society, with ulterior views beyond the mere amusement of the reader. He has not studied, or he does not understand, what has been fitly termed the properties of a composition: he allows himself in almost every chapter to outrage probability; his situations are often ludicrously incongruous; and the language of his characters, as well as that employed throughout the narrative, is totally out of keeping with the quality and circumstances of the interlocutors. That a young and gifted tailor, who for the whole day has been pent up in a stifling garret, with the symptoms of consumptive disease unmistakeably developed in his constitution, should also devote the moiety of his hours of rest to the acquisition of the Latin language, and become in three months' time a perfect master of Virgil, is not an impossibility, though we opine that such instances of suicidal exertion are comparatively rare; but when we find the same young man, not only versed in the classics, but tolerably acquainted with the Italian and German poets, a fluent speaker of French, an accurate historian, a proficient in divinity, in metaphysics, and in natural science--a disciple of Tennyson in verse, and a pupil of Emerson in style--the draft upon our credulity is somewhat too large, and we must necessarily decline to honour it. The world has only beheld one Admirable Crichton; and even he is rather a myth than a reality--seeing that we can merely judge of the extent of his acquirements by the vague report of contemporaries, and the collections of an amusing coxcomb, who, out of very slender materials, has contrived to construct a ponderous and bombastic romance.[49] Crichton has not left us one scrap of writing to prove that his attainments were more than the results of a gigantic memory, aided by a singularly acute and logical intellect. But Alton Locke altogether eclipses Crichton. The latter had, at all events, the full benefit of the schools: the former was wholly devoid of such instruction. Crichton spent his days at least in the College; Alton sat stitching on the shop-board. So that the existence of such a phenomenon becomes worse than problematical, especially when we find that, after abandoning paletots and launching into a literary career, Mr Locke could find no more profitable employment than that of writing articles for a Chartist newspaper, which articles, moreover, were by no means invariably inserted. We take this to be the leading fault of the book, because it is infinitely