"
We must, however, object to Fullalove, who is quite unworthy of the
author, though perhaps complacently regarded by him as a success, being
merely the traditional Yankee compound of patents and conjectures, a
little smarter than usual, as of course a passage through Mr. Reade's
pen must make him;--he never touched his brain. Vespasian, also, is not
so good as he might be, although one enjoys his contempt for the
pirate's crew of Papuans, Sooloos, and Portuguese, as a "mixellaneous
bilin' of darkies," and finds something inimitable in his injured
dignity over the anomalous _sobriquet_ afforded him, whose changes he
rings through analogy and anatomy till he declares himself to be only a
"darned anemone." The real charm of the book, however, lies in the
beautiful relation which it pictures between mother and children, and in
the nature of the daughter herself, so exuberant, so dancing, yet the
foam subsiding into such a luminous body of clearness, which so lights
up the page with its loveliness, that, seeing how an artless woman is
foreign to Mr. Reade's ideas, we are forced to believe that Nature was
too strong for him and he wrote against the grain.
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