Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all the relics of an ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the ‘music of humanity’, and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension, – this form of imaginative power must always be among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigour. Yet we find ladies constantly choosing to make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous, by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian princesses, and attributing their rhetorical arguments to Jewish high-priests and Greek philosophers. A recent example of this heavy imbecility is Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Dispersion, which forms part of a series, ‘uniting,’ we are told, ‘taste, humour, and sound principles’. Adonijah, we presume, exemplifies the tale of ‘sound principles’; the taste and humour are to be found in other members of the series. We are told on the cover, that the incidents of this tale are ‘fraught with unusual interest’, and the preface winds up thus: ‘To those who feel interested in the dispersed of Israel and Judea, these pages may afford, perhaps, information on an important subject, as well as amusement’. Since the ‘important subject’ on which this book is to afford information is not specified, it may possibly lie in some esoteric meaning to which we have no key; but if it has relation to the dispersed of Israel and Judea at any period of their history, we believe a tolerably well-informed school-girl already knows much more of it than she will find in this ‘Tale of the Jewish Dispersion’. Adonijah is simply the feeblest kind of love story, supposed to be instructive, we presume, because the hero is a Jewish captive, and the heroine a Roman vestal; because they and their friends are converted to Christianity after the shortest and easiest method approved by the ‘Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Jews’; and because, instead of being written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar style of grandiloquence which is held by some lady novelists to give an antique colouring; and which we recognize at once in such phrases as these: – ‘the splendid regnal talents undoubtedly possessed by the Emperor Nero’ – ‘the expiring scion of a lofty stem’ – ‘the virtuous partner of his couch’ – ‘ah, by Vesta!’ – and ‘I tell thee, Roman’. Among the quotations which serve at once for instruction and ornament on the cover of this volume, there is one from Miss Sinclair, which informs us that ‘Works of imagination are avowedly read by men of science, wisdom, and piety’; from which we suppose the reader is to gather the cheering inference that Dr Daubeny, Mr Mill, or Mr Maurice, may openly indulge himself with the perusal of Adonijah, without being obliged to secrete it among the sofa cushions, or read it by snatches under the dinner-table.