In whose deep recesses hidden, Fortune heaps her glittering store:
Enter, then, the dreary pathway—but, above each lonely mound
Lightly tread, and pause to ponder—for, like those who slumber round,
Thou mayst also lie forgotten on Ambition’s burial ground!
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
The Upper Ten Thousand. By Charles Astor Bristed. Stringer & Townsend, Broadway.
A very clever book, by a rather clever man. We learn it is the most popular brochure of the season, nor do we wonder at it, for it has all the elements to procure it a fleeting popularity—pungency, personality, impudence, insolence, ill-nature, satire and slang, malignity and mendacity—every thing, in short, likely to tickle the palates of all classes, to pander to the worst tastes, please the worst passions, and gratify the self-adulation of all readers.
It is not to be denied that the descriptions are racy and pointed; that some caste-affectations are skillfully satirized; some local absurdities happily shown up; and that there are some points of humor, and even some sound criticisms, mixed up with much grossness, much ill taste, most disgusting egotism, and personality the most broad, brutal, and malign.
As to Mr. Charles Astor Bristed’s denial of the applicability of Harry Benson, alias Harry Masters, in this edition, to himself, and of all personality or individual satire throughout the pages of the work—he may say what he will, but no one will believe him. An author who, in depicting a fictitious hero, chooses to identify that hero with himself, to the extent of accurately describing the houses of his own grandfather and father-in-law, with their respective bearings, distances and situations in the city, as those of the same kinsmen of his hero—of attributing to him well-known incidents of his own life, such as lending money to a dissipated and debauched young ex-lieutenant of the English army, and then dunning his half heartbroken father for the paltry amount, with rowdy letters, which he subsequently published in the newspapers—buying a negro slave, in order to liberate him and gain Buncombe, as it is called, by making capital of his philanthropy in the public journals—and, lastly, ascribing to his fictitious personage his own domestic grievances, and his own quarrels at a watering-place—all matters of actual notoriety—has no earthly right to complain if the public say he has made himself his own hero.