Beauchamp himself is an impossible fellow, too wearisomely in earnest, of a single note, which he twangs in a monotonous variety of tones from morning until night. We fancy at the start, after the ominous prologue, that we are fronting a humorous adventure when we find him a sailor lad, addressing his challenge to the gentlemen of the French guard. But unhappily we are not shown the French guardsmen reading his missive, and the episode falls flat. We feel we have been deceived, and resent the deception. To make up for it, we give our sympathies, such as they are, to the uncle, a mixture of twelfth-century baron and unintelligible Whig. He relieves us of the monotony of Beauchamp’s lance-breaking with society, and his extraordinary conduct in his heart affairs. No sympathy is due to a man who could go prating politics through drawing-rooms and missing two such women as Renée and Cecilia Halkett to fall upon Jenny Denham. Indeed, there are some chapters in the book that provoke a sigh in the bosom of the conscientious readers for the useful art of skipping. Noticeably those dealing with that unmitigated old bore, Dr. Shrapnel, and his everlasting letters. Mr. Romfrey suggested that his speechifying nephew should be sent into his element over in Ireland. But no Irish speech-maker of the most pronounced stage in the disease could ever match Beauchamp by reason of the latter’s want of humour. Irish orators off the Parliamentary stage and the public platform are ready to laugh at themselves and at each other, whereas Beauchamp is in deadly earnest from six o’clock in the morning until twelve o’clock at night. Surely it can have been nothing else but sheer weariness that forced the writer to pitch his hero unexpectedly into the Channel, and bring his career to an untimely end. Never was catastrophe more inexplicable, and from the artistic point of view less justifiable, than Beauchamp’s death. We wake as from a prolonged nightmare with a gasp. Having failed to understand why he was there at all, we fail still less to comprehend why he is knocked into eternity in a single last page, and instead of being touched, we are simply astounded. Of a truth, the drawback to the book is its politics incessantly harped upon. The subject, treated in the high colours of Dumas, of the plumed and sabred days, carries a scent of intrigue and romance to interest us; or the song and chapters of revolt, conspiracy and revolution have our hearts for a nod. What should we have done had we waded through all this truly English stuff of Whiggery, Toryism and Radicalism, without the sweet refreshment of those Venetian days--the night on the Adriatic, and the lovely morning at sea under the Alps? Or canvassing with this tiresome hero without the society of that amiable and amusing idiot, Lord Palmet, whose mind runs to women, and who murmurs before a virtuous voter in a local institute, ‘Capital place for an appointment with a woman’? This is