may be doubted whether Tremaine some thirty years hence will be more read than Coelebs in Search of a Wife.  If Mr. Ward did not found the school of fashionable novelists, he was certainly among the founders; and he infused into the best of his works, De Vere, a real knowledge of Parliamentary life, a newer and truer view of statesmen and nobles, though a little en beau, and a great variety of actual characters.  The circumstance of Wentworth’s supposed resemblance to Canning, and the accident of publication at a time when the official conspiracy of the novel seemed acting in Parliament, gave De Vere a success with the world at large, which its length and longwindedness might have marred.  Mr. Ward’s essays (generally in the form of stories) were not so successful with the public as his fictions.  We think he was by nature designed for an essayist—­naturally given to discuss and expound; but nature had denied him that penetrating originality of perception, that vigor of thought, and (as a consequence) that terseness of style, which are necessary to render the essay attractive and to preserve it.  As Robert Plumer Ward was essentially confined to the present, so he was dependent on it; he was nothing if not in the mode, and in his later works he rather fell behind the fashion.

His life as presented in these volumes was not very remarkable or eventful.  His father was a merchant at Gibraltar, and also held the post of chief clerk of the civil department of the Ordnance in that garrison:  his mother was a Spanish Jewess.  Robert Ward was born in London, in 1765, on a visit of the family to England; and, after an education at private schools, was sent to Oxford, in 1783.  He left the University in 1787, in debt; and soon after became a student of the Inner Temple.  An affection of the knee-joint sent him to Bareges:  he was speedily cured; but was so attracted by the pleasures of French society, that he remained in France till the Revolution; from which he had a narrow escape.

“It happened, unfortunately for him, that another ‘Ward,’ of about the same age and personal appearance, had incurred the suspicion of the Republican party, at a moment when suspicion lost all its doubts, and death followed close upon the heels of certainty.  To use his own words, ’I was arrested for having the same name and the same colored coat and waistcoat as another Ward, guilty of treason; was ordered without trial to Paris, to be guillotined; and only escaped by their catching the real traitor:  I was, however, banished the republic, merely for my name’s sake.’”

On his return to England he was called to the bar, in June 1790; and but for a singular circumstance might have passed through life as a literary barrister, with middling success in law and letters.