On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    though he live in a single room on a fifth floor , is thought and thinks himself as fit for any society or any salon in the capital , and is treated on as perfect a footing of equality when there , as the richest man in the nation . Let M . Chales well meditate on these advantages , and if he would learn by contrast how to appreciate them , let him read Mr . Bulwer ' s book ; for as yet , it is evident , he has but looked into it .

    Does not he accuse Mr . Bulwer of having written his book expressly to decry the institution of property ? of wishing to put an end to commerce ? of demanding < une Angleterre sans commerce , une Angleterre spartiate , qui croupirait dans son i gnorance et dans son abrutissement V Now , every person either in England or France who has read the book , knows that there is

    not in it , from beginning to end , so much as one word either against the institution of property or against commerce . It is only M . Chales who in his simplicity imagines , that whoever hints that the trading spirit and the love of money-getting can possibly exist in excess , must be an enemy to property and to commerce . All the moral writers who have ever lived , Greek ,

    Roman , German , English , French , were all , according to this writer ' s curious definition , Saint-Simonians . ' Mr . Bulwer is occasionally superficial , and like all epigrammatic writers , frequently attains smartness at the expense of accuracy ; he also occasionally temporizes with same classes of the enemies of improvement ; but , with all its faults , his book is

    the truest ever written on the social condition of England ; and the French may be assured , that although he misunderstands many of the smaller features of the English character , he has not in greater things at all overcharged the unfavourable side . Because he writes with perhaps somewhat too visible an aiming at effect , M . Chales accuses him of attempting to make fallacies

    pass by means of lively writing ; unconscious that the very liveliness of the writing is acting upon himself in quite the contrary way : he thinks the observations must be shallow because they are brilliantly expressed . Mr . Bulwer ' s English readers have , I make no doubt , been very generally impressed in the same manner . It would be a great mistake to suppose that frivolity of manner in this country prepossesses readers in favour of an

    author ' s opinions ; on the contrary , it excites a prejudice against them . But Mr . Buiwer probably thought it better to be read , even at a disadvantage , than not to be read . Such is the choice a writer usually has to make , in addressing himself to English readers , at least of the higher and middle classes . If his mode of writing be lively and amusing , they distrust all he says ; if he be not amusing , they do not read * him at all . I could easily prove to you by examples that the necessity of being amusing is the cause of almost every blunder in Mr .

    Untitled Article

    390 The Journal des Debate and the Engluh .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 390, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/6/