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thing." Stand apart from an apostate world, "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.'

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In the apostolic and primitive times the church of Christ was one. But, with the strictest internal union, a decided distinction was kept up between the general church and heretics. In fact there never can be any real union of heart among believers, except in the same degree as there is a real separation from infidels. The member of the primitive church stood apart from the unbeliever with holy fear, while the unbeliever said "acknowledge us," and eagerly pressed to be received. And so it must be again. So it one day will be. It cannot be that the Redeemer revisit his church upon earth, till she again be ONE. To stand apart in this manner may be deemed pharisaical, or even unkind. And those who follow a different course may be called candid by a world which feels itself in no small degree accommodated by their liberality. But, "What communion hath light with darkness? Or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?"

On those various classes of Christians who are comprehended under the name of Orthodox Dissenters, we would especially impress these considerations. We mean those who are not in communion with the establishment, yet so far hold the truth upon essential points, that they may be considered as constituting, with the faithful members of the Church of England, the general Church of Christ. Why, we ask then, should they in any instance form an unnatural alliance, or maintain an unnatural union with men, who deny the supremacy of that Being, to whom they look for salvation? That which should unite the orthodox dissenter with the faithful member of the establishment, is a community of religious principles, a community of faith, a community of hope. That which does, we fear, too often unite him with the unbeliever, is a community of political interests. Would it be found, then, if it came to the pull, that the latter tie is the stronger? We are unwilling to think it possible. May no secular injustice, no ecclesiastical bigotry, no spiritual wickedness in high places," no ill-judged abuse from the pulpits of the establishment, retard that re-union, which is so devoutly to be wished and which must some day or other take place, of all the members of Christ's numerous and divided family.

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ART. VI.-Kenilworth. A Romance. By the Author of "Waverley, Ivanhoe, &c." Three vols. Constable and Co. Edinburgh. 1821.

We do not intend a serious criticism upon this Romance; having neither room nor inclination for more than a few remarks. The truth is, that when we find literature in any of its departments taking the form of a mere trading adventure, we look upon it as scarcely within our jurisdiction. It becomes rather a subject of calculation than criticism. The author and publisher, in such a case, have the same motive, the same interest, and the same success. If the object of a writer is simply to coin his brain into money; or, in other words, to turn out a saleable performance, he has a right to say to his critic, you must try me with reference to my professed object; my work is good or bad according as it is framed to achieve its purpose: quarrel with my purpose if you please, but I can not be said to have executed my work amiss, if I have made it adequate to the end I proposed to myself in preparing it. Now we cannot but think that this is something like the case of the Author of the Romance of " Kenilworth." But still we must not allow him all the benefit of the argument. There is always so much of genius in whatever he does, and the eminent intellectual station he holds gives him so much power over our national literature and the public taste, that we cannot consider him as franchised from our cognizance by the voluntary degradation of his talents. Some men may escape us like the cuttle fish by muddying the medium through which they move; but the Author of "Kenilworth" floats like the dolphin, with his back above the element in which he takes his pastime.

"Kenilworth" is a tedious performance. The staple of the story, which is very meagre, is drawn out into thready details of sempiternal prolixity. The event on which it is founded is thus related in Miss Aikin's very interesting Memoirs of the court of Elizabeth:

"Just when the whispered scandal of the court had apprized him how obvious to all beholders the partiality of his sovereign had become-first, when her rejection of the proposals of so many foreign princes had confirmed the suspicion that her heart had given itself at home;-just, in short, when every thing conspired to sanction hopes, which, under any other circumstances, would have appeared no less visionary than presumptuous, at the very juncture most favourable to his ambition, but most perilous to his reputation, lord Robert Dudley lost his wife, and by a fate equally sudden and mysterious.

"This unfortunate lady had been sent by her husband, under the conduct of Sir Richard Varney, one of his retainers ;-but for what reason, or under what pretext does not appear;-to Cumnor House,

in Berkshire, a solitary mansion inhabited by Anthony Foster, also a dependent of Dudley's, and bound to him by particular obligations. Here she soon after met with her death; and Varney and Forster, who appear to have been alone in the house with her, gave out that it happened by an accidental fall down stairs; but this account, from various causes, gained so little credit in the neighbourhood, that reports of the most sinister import were quickly propagated. These discourses soon reached the ears of Thomas Lever, a prebendary of Coventry, and a very conscientious person, who immediately addressed to the secretaries of state an earnest letter, still extant, beseeching them to cause strict inquiry to be made into the case, as it was commonly believed that the lady had been murdered; but he mentioned no particular grounds of this belief; and it cannot now be ascertained whether any steps were taken in consequence of his application. If there were, they certainly produced no satisfactory explanation of the circumstance; for not only the popular voice, which was ever hostile to Dudley, continued to accuse him as the contriver of her fate, but Cecil himself, in a memorandum, drawn up some years after, of reasons against the queen's making him her husband, mentions among other objections, that he is infamed by the death of his wife.'

"Whether the thorough investigation of this matter was evaded by the artifices of Dudley, or whether his enemies, finding it impracticable to bring the crime home to him, found it more adviseable voluntarily to drop the enquiry; certain it is, that the queen was never brought in any manner to take cognizance of the affair; and that the credit of Dudley continued as high with her as ever. But in the opinion of the country, the favourite passed ever after for a dark designer, capable of perpetrating any secret villany in furtherance of his designs, and skilful enough to conceal his atrocity under a cloak of artifice and hypocrisy impervious to the partial eye of his royal mistress, though penetrated by all the world besides. This idea of his character caused him afterwards to be accused of practising against the lives of several other persons who were observed to perish opportunely for his poses. Each of these charges will be particularly examined in its proper place; but it ought here to be observed, that not one of them appears to be supported by so many circumstances of probability as the first; and even in support of this no direct evidence has ever been adduced.”

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Historians are pretty well agreed that the Earl of Leicester was unworthy of his high fortunes. But a favourite is proverbially without a friend, and it is well known that that exalted nobleman had many enemies; it may, therefore, be reasonably doubted, whether his true character has been honestly handed down to us. That he abounded in those dazzling qualities which are so apt to engage the admiration of women, the notorious parts of his history sufficiently attest; and that he excelled in the arts of dissimulation and persuasion can as little be doubted, when it is remembered that he maintained an ascendant interest in the mind of Elizabeth during a period of 30 years, amidst a variety

of faults and failures, personal and political, with enemies in abundance filling the court of his mistress, watching his actions and words, and favoured with opportunities of construing them to his disadvantage.

The Author of the work before us has a genius that will not yield to the stubborn verities of history, nor, indeed, would it consist with the professed purpose of his productions so to do; but we cannot feel that it is quite allowable to take the recorded characters of history for the actors in his imaginary scenes. To bring before us strong and lively portraits of the prevailing manners of any epoch in our annals, by giving a particular date to a story, and accommodating a fictitious narrative to the political events of that period, without any tampering with real events or characters, seems not only a justifiable, but a profitable use of history; it may contribute to a juster and clearer apprehension of the progress of manners and knowledge as they have passed through their several stages, and thus add materially to the interest and attraction of our domestic chronicles; but where the veritable personages, whose actions and principles, moral and political, hold a distinguished place in our records, and who are before the tribunal of posterity for the operative share they have had in transactions, the consequences of which we may be yet experiencing, are made to figure in a fictitious narrative as heroes and heroines, it does appear to us that the authentic truths as well as the retributive justice of his tory are treated with too little regard. The drama, it is true, has always exercised this right over the property of history; but poetry and history run in a course so different, that there is no danger of their streams intermingling; they are as far apart as fact and effect, feeling and information, actual and possible existence: poetry has a world of her own, over which she rules with a magic sceptre, giving what form or size she pleases to all the beings which are subject to her dominion; but a story in the form of prosaic narrative, and ostensibly an account of things as they happened, sometimes rigidly, sometimes imperfectly true, making little appeal to the imagination, and approaching the heart by the closest semblance of reality, if it assumes for its agents actual historical persons, and adopts attested and notorious facts for the basis of its fiction, encroaches, as it appears to us, somewhat too rudely upon the severe, we had almost said the consecrated and exclusive province, of our National Annals.

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Of Leicester, history has given us a pretty correct and consistent portrait. The novel before us, in the warped and fabricated account which it has presented of that artful and ambitious man, has compounded a character of great incongruities, and properties very irreconcileable. He is at once a finished dissem

bler, and a genuine lover, a dastardly courtier, and a redoubted son of chivalry, penetrating and circumspect to a proverb, and the dupe of a most transparent knave; for such Richard Varney, we think, must be taken to be, in spite of the efforts of the author to paint him otherwise. Supposing Leicester to have been anxious to wear out the life of his unhappy lady by ill-treatment, or to get rid of her by some more compendious method, as the case is represented in history, the miscreants to whose keeping he committed her, were properly selected; but the manner of his disposing of her, while he pursued his game of ambition at court, was per fectly at variance with the devoted affection which the novel represents him as entertaining towards her.

Queen Elizabeth's character is exhibited in the broad lines in which history has presented her to posterity. The author of the romance, has taken her much as he found her. She is the Queen Elizabeth upon record; never the mere woman where it was necessary to be the Queen, but the woman thoroughly and empha tically, whenever she could afford or venture to be such. The characteristics both of the woman and the Queen are exhibited, with the exaggerations in which writers of romances claim the privilege of indulging; and we cannot help thinking that the palpable extravagance of some of the compliments addressed to her, look very much like that sort of jesting with the weak part of another, which in the lounger's vocabulary is called "quizzing." After all, however, it must be admitted, that the character of this great Queen, which this book presents, is necessarily very unfinished. We see nothing of her in the great transactions of her reign; and perhaps it was hardly fair towards her memory to represent her only under circumstances to display her foibles.

In those particulars of this gloomy story which history informs us least about, the author is most to be commended, probably because more his own master, and more at liberty to indulge his powerful imagination. The melancholy of Sir Hugh Robsart, the father of Amy, whom, with the aid of Varney, the Earl of Leicester had enticed from her home, and from her first engagements, is depicted with an exquisite pencil. The Earl had married his daughter: though with this fact the father does not appear to have been made acquainted; and both himself, and the young man to whom she had been betrothed, almost to the conclusion of the story, remain under the impression that Varney had been the author of the calamity and the disgrace.

Sir Hugh Robsart is the Sir Roger de Coverley of that day, with a keener addiction to the chase, and a harsher sort of rusticity, blended with the pride of family and martial descent. The description of the gloom into which he falls on account of his daughter's elopement, is in the best style of this master. His

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