It is well that hard words break no bones, else two or three gentlemen
of literary notoriety would be in a sorry plight after reading the
following passage in a recent _Magazine_. We stand by, and like
the fellow in the play, bite our thumb:--

"Surely, surely, all men, women, and children, not cursed with the
fatuity that would become a vice-president of the Phrenological Society,
must by this time be about heartsick of what are called Novels of
Fashionable Life. Only two men of any pretensions to superiority of
talent have had part in the uproarious manufacture of this ware, that
has been dinned in our ears by trumpet after trumpet, during the last
six or seven years. Mr. Theodore Hook began the business--a man of such
strong native sense and thorough knowledge of the world as it is, that
we cannot doubt the _coxcombry_ which has drawn so much derision on his
_sayings_ and _doings_ was all, to use a phrase which he himself has
brought into fashion, _humbug_. He could not cast his keen eyes over any
considerable circle of society in this country, without perceiving the
melancholy fact, that the British nation labours under a universal mania
for gentility--all the world hurrying and bustling in the same idle
chase--good honest squires and baronets, with pedigrees of a thousand
years, and estates of ten thousand acres--ay, and even noble lords--yea,
the noblest of the noble themselves (or at least their ladies), rendered
fidgety and uncomfortable by the circumstance of their not somehow or
other belonging to one particular little circle in London. Comely
round-paunched parsons and squireens, again, all over the land, eating
the bread of bitterness, and drinking the waters of sorrow, because
they are, or think they are, tipt the cold shoulder by these same
honest squires and baronets, &c. &c. &c. who, excluded from Almack's,