elixir of immortality to furnish out for himself | hour; but it is ever the peculiar power of Mr. a dainty solitude, where he may dwell, soothed Godwin to make us feel that there is something with the music of his own undying thoughts, within us which cannot perish! and rejoicing in his severance from his frail and transitory fellows. Apart from those among whom he moves, his yearnings for sympathy become more intense as it eludes him, and his perceptions of the mortal lot of his species become more vivid and more fond, as he looks on it from an intellectual eminence which is alike unassailable to death and to joy. Even in this work, where the author has to conduct a perpetual miracle, his exceeding earnestness makes it difficult to believe him a fabulist. Listen to his hero, as he expatiates in the first consciousness of his high prerogatives:

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"Fleetwood" has less of our author's characteristic energy than any other of his works. The earlier parts of it, indeed, where the formation of the hero's character, in free rovings amidst the wildest of nature's scenery, is traced, have a deep beauty which reminds us of some of the holiest imaginations of Wordsworth. But when the author would follow him into the world-through the frolics of college, the dissipations of Paris, and the petty disquietudes of matrimonial life-we feel that he has condescended too far. He is no graceful trifler; he cannot work in these frail and low materials. There is, however, one scene in this novel most wild and fearful. This is where Fleetwood, who has long brooded in anguish over the idea of his wife's falsehood, keeps strange festival on his wedding-daywhen, having procured a waxen image of her whom he believes perfidious, and dressed a frightful figure in a uniform to represent her imagined paramour, he locks himself in an apartment with these horrid counterfeits, a supper of cold meats, and a barrel-organ, on which he plays the tunes often heard from the pair he believes guilty, till his silent agony gives place to delirium, he gazes around with glassy eyes, sees strange sights and dallies with frightful mockeries, and at last tears the dreadful spectacle to atoms, and is seized with furious madness. We do not remember, even in the works of our old dramatists, any thing of its kind comparable to this voluptuous fantasy of despair.

"I surveyed my limbs, all the joints and articulations of my frame, with curiosity and astonishment. What! exclaimed I, these limbs, this complicated but brittle frame shall last for ever! No disease shall attack it; no pain shall seize it; death shall withhold from it for ever his abhorred grasp! Perpetual vigour, perpetual activity, perpetual youth, shall take up their abode with me! Time shall generate in me no decay, shall not add a wrinkle to my brow, or convert a hair of my head to gray! This body was formed to die; this edifice to crumble into dust; the principles of corruption and mortality are mixed up in every atom of my frame. But for me the laws of nature are suspended, the eternal wheels of the universe roll backward; I am destined to be triumphant over Fate and Time! Months, years, cycles, centuries! To me these are but as indivisible moments. I shall never become old; I shall always be, as it were, in the porch "Mandeville" has all the power of its auand infancy of existence; no lapse of years thor's earliest writings; but its main subjectshall subtract any thing from my future dura- the development of an engrossing and maddention. I was born under Louis the Twelfth; ing hatred-is not one which can excite the life of Francis the First now threatens a human sympathy. There is, however, a bright speedy termination; he will be gathered to his relief to the gloom of the picture, in the angelic fathers, and Henry, his son, will succeed him. disposition of Clifford, and the sparkling loveBut what are princes, and kings, and genera-liness of Henrietta, who appears "full of life, tions of men to me! I shall become familiar and splendour, and joy." All Mr. Godwin's with the rise and fall of empires; in a little female heroines have a certain airiness and while the very name of France, my country, radiance-a visionary grace, peculiar to them, will perish from off the face of the earth, and which may at first surprise by their contrast men will dispute about the situation of Paris, to the robustness of his masculine creations. as they dispute about the site of ancient Nine-But it will perhaps be found that the more deeply veh, and Babylon, and Troy. Yet I shall still be young. I shall take my most distant posterity by the hand; I shall accompany them in their career; and, when they are worn out and exhausted, shall shut up the tomb over them, and set forward."

This is a strange tale, but it tells like a true one! When we first read it, it seemed as though it had itself the power of alchemy to steal into our veins, and render us capable of resisting death and age. For a short-too short! a space, all time seemed open to our personal view-we felt no longer as of yesterday; but the grandest parts of our knowledge of the past seemed mightiest recollections of a far-off childhood.

man is conversant with the energies of his own heart, the more will he seek for opposite qualities in woman.

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His

Of all Mr. Godwin's writings the choicest in point of style is a little essay on Sepulchres." Here his philosophic thought, subdued and sweetened by the contemplation of mortality, is breathed forth in the gentlest tone. "Political Justice," with all the extravagance of its first edition, or with all the inconsistencies of its last, is a noble work, replete with lofty principle and thought, and often leading to the most striking results by a process of the severest reasoning. Man, indeed, cannot and ought not to act universally on its leading doctrine that we should in all things seek only the greatest amount of good without favour or affection; but it is at least better than the low I selfishness of the world. It breathes also a This was the happy extravagance of an mild and cheerful faith in the progressive ad

"The wars we too remembered of King Nine, And old Assaracus, and Ibycus divine."

vances and the final perfection of the species. | ness his success. To our minds, indeed, he It was this good hope for humanity which ex-sufficiently proves the falsehood of his advercited Mr. Malthus to affirm, that there is in the sary's doctrines by his own intellectual characconstitution of man's nature a perpetual barrier ter. His works are, in themselves, evidences to any extensive improvement in his earthly that there is power and energy in man which condition. After a long interval, Mr. Godwin have never yet been fully brought into action, has announced a reply to this popular system- and which were not given to the species in a system which reduces man to an animal, vain. He has lived himself in the soft and governed by blind instinct, and destitute of rea- mild light of those peaceful years, which he son, sentiment, imagination, and hope, whose believes shall hereafter bless the world, when most mysterious instincts are matter of calcu- force and selfishness shall disappear, and love lation to be estimated by rules of geometrical | and joy shall be the unerring lights of the series! Most earnestly do we desire to wit- species.

MATURIN.

[NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.]

twine with the heart-strings, and which keep their hold until the golden chords of our sensibility and imagination themselves are broken. They pass by us sometimes like gorgeous phantoms, sometimes like "horrible shadows and unreal mockeries," which seem to elude us because they are not of us. When we fol low him closest, he introduces us into a region where all is unsatisfactory and unreal-the chaos of principles, fancies, and passionswhere mightiest elements are yet floating without order, where appearances between substance and shadow perpetually harass us, where visionary forms beckon us through painful avenues, and, on approach, sink into despicable realities; and pillars which looked ponderous and immovable at a distance, melt at the touch into air, and are found to be only masses of vapour and of cloud. He neither raises us to the skies, nor "brings his angels down," but astonishes by a phantasmagoria of strange appearances, sometimes scarcely distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, but which, when most clearly defined, come not near us, nor claim kindred by a warm and living touch. This chill remoteness from hu manity is attended by a general want of harmony and proportion in the whole-by a wild excursiveness of sensibility and thoughtwhich add to its ungenial influence, and may be traced to the same causes.

THE author of Montorio and of Bertram is unquestionably a person gifted with no ordinary powers. He has a quick sensibility-a penetrating and intuitive acuteness-and an unrivalled vigour and felicity of language, which enable him at one time to attain the happiest condensation of thought, and at others to pour forth a stream of eloquence, rich, flowing, and deep, checkered with images of delicate loveliness, or darkened by broad shadows cast from objects of stern and adamantine majesty. Yet, in common with many other potent spirits of the present time, he fails to excite within us any pure and lasting sympathy. We do not, on reading his works, feel that we have entered on a precious and imperishable treasure. They dazzle, they delight, they surprise, and they weary us-we lay them down with a vague admiration for the author, and try to shake off their influence as we do the impressions of a feverish dream. It is not thus that we receive the productions of genuine and holy bards—of Shakspeare, of Milton, of Spenser, or of Wordsworth-whose farreaching imaginations come home to our hearts, who become the companions of our sweetest moods, and with whom we long to set up our everlasting rest." Their creations are often nearest to our hearts when they are farthest removed from the actual experience of our lives. We travel on the bright tracks which their genius reveals to us as safely and If we were disposed to refer these defects to with as sure and fond a tread as along the one general source, we should attribute them broad highway of the world. When the re- to the want of an imagination proportionate to gions which they set before us are the most sensibility and to mastery of language in the distant from our ordinary perceptions, we yet writer's mind, or to his comparative neglect of seem at home in them, their wonders are that most divine of human faculties. It is edistrangely familiar to us, and the scene, over-fying to observe how completely the nature of spread with a consecrating and lovely lustre, breaks on us, not as a wild fantastic novelty, but as a revived recollection of some holier life, which the soul rejoices thus delightfully to recognise.

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Not thus do the works of Mr. Maturin-original and surprising as they often are-affect us. They have no fibres in them which en

this power is mistaken by many who profess to decide on matters of taste. They regard it as something wild and irregular, the reverse of truth, nature, and reason, which is divided from insanity only by "a thin partition," and which, uncontrolled by sterner powers, forms the essence of madness. They think it abounds in speeches crowded with tawdry and

It is easy to perceive how it is that the imThus the products of genuine imagination perfect creations of men of sensibility and of are "all compact." It is, indeed, only the eloquence strike and dazzle more at the first, compactness and harmony of its pictures than the completest works of truly imaginative which give to it its name or its value. To poets. A perfect statue-a temple fashioned discover that there are mighty elements in with exactest art-appear less, at a mere humanity to observe that there are bright glance, from the nicety of their proportions. hues and graceful forms in the external world The vast majority of readers, in an age like -and to know the fitting names of these-is ours, have neither leisure nor taste to seek and all which is required to furnish out a rich stock ponder over the effusions of holiest genius. of spurious imagination to one who aspires to They must be awakened into admiration by the claim of a wild and irregular genius. For something new and strange and surprising; him a dictionary is a sufficient guide to Par- and the more remote from their daily thoughts nassus. It is only by representing those in- and habits-the more fantastical and daringtellectual elements in their finest harmony-by the effort, the more will it please, because the combining those hues and forms in the fairest more it will rouse them. Thus a man who pictures or by making the glorious combina- will exhibit some impossible combination of tions of external things the symbols of truth | heroism and meanness-of virtue and of vice

-of heavenly love and infernal malignity and | in this story, a being whom we are long led baseness-will receive their wonder and their to believe is not of this world-who speaks praise. They call this POWER, which is in in the tones of the sepulchre, glides through reality the most pitiable weakness. It is because a writer has not imagination enough to exhibit in new forms the universal qualities of nature and the soul, that he takes some strange and horrible anomaly as his theme. Incompetent to the divine task of rendering beauty "a simple product of the common day," he tries to excite emotion by disclosing the foulest recess of the foulest heart. As he strikes only one feeling, and that coarsely and ungently, he appears to wield a mightier weapon than he whose harmonious beauty sheds its influence equably over the whole of the sympathies. That which touches with strange commotion, and mere violence on the heart, but leaves no image there, seems to vulgar spirits more potent than the faculty which applies to it all perfect figures, and leaves them to sink gently into its fleshly tablets to remain there for ever. Yet, surely, that which merely shakes is not equal even in power to that which, impresses. The wild disjointed part may be more amazing to a diseased perception than the well-compacted whole; but it is the nice balancing of properties, the soft blending of shades, and the all-pervading and reconciling light shed over the harmonious imagination, which take off the sense of rude strength that alone is discernible in its naked elements. Is there more of heavenly power in seizing from among the tumult of chaos and eternal night, strange and fearful abortions, or in brooding over the vast abyss, and making it pregnant with life and glory and joy? Is it the higher exercise of human faculties to represent the frightful discordances of passion, or to show the grandeurs of humanity in that majestic repose which is at once an anticipation and a proof of its eternal destiny? Is transitory vice-the mere accident of the species and those vices too which are the rarest and most appalling of all its accidents-or that good which is its essence and which never can perish, fittest for the uses of the bard? Shall he desire to haunt the caves which lie lowest on the banks of Acheron, or the soft bowers watered by "Siloa's brook that flows fast by the oracle of God?"

Mr. Maturin gave decisive indications of a morbid sensibility and a passionate eloquence out-running his imaginative faculties, in the commencement of his literary career. His first romance, the "Family of Montorio," is one of the wildest and strangest of all "false creations proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain." It is for the most part a tissue of magnificent yet unappalling horrors. Its great faults as a work of amusement, are the long and unrelieved series of its gloomy and marvellous scenes, and the unsatisfactory explanation of them all, as arising from mere human agency. This last error he borrowed from Mrs. Ratcliffe, to whom he is far inferior in the economy of terrors, but whom he greatly transcends in the dark majesty of his style. As his events are far more wild and wondrous than hers, so his development is necessarily far more incredible and vexatious. There is,

the thickest walls, haunts two distant brothers in their most secret retirements through their strange wanderings, leads one of his victims to a scene which he believes infernal, and there terrifies him with sights of the wildest magic-and who after all this, and after really vindicating to the fancy his claim to the supernatural by the fearful cast of his language-is discovered to be a low impostor, who has produced all by the aid of poor tricks and secret passages! Where is the policy of this? Unless, by his power, the author had given a credibility to magic through four-fifths of his work, it never could have excited any feeling but that of impatience or of scorn. And when we have surrendered ourselves willingly to his guidance-when we have agreed to believe impossibilities at his bidding why does he reward our credence with derision, and tacitly reproach us for not having detected his idle mockeries? After all, too, the reason is no more satisfied than the fancy; for it would be a thousand times easier to believe in the possibility of spiritual influences, than in a long chain of mean contrivances, no one of which could ever succeed. The first is but one wonder, and that one to which our nature has a strange leaning; the last are numberless, and have nothing to reconcile them to our thoughts. In submitting to the former, we contentedly lay aside our reasoning facul ties; in approaching the latter our reason itself is appealed to at the moment when it is insulted. Great talent is, however, unquestionably exhibited in this singular story. A stern justice breathes solemnly through all the scenes in the devoted castle. "Fate sits on its dark battlements, and frowns." There is a spirit of deep philosophy in the tracing of the gradual influence of patricidal thoughts on the hearts of the brothers, which would finally exhibit the danger of dallying with evil fancies, if the subject were not removed so far from all ordinary temptations. Some of the scenes of horror, if they were not accumulated until they wear out their impression, would produce an effect inferior to none in the works of Ratcliffe or of Lewis. The scene in which Flippo escapes from the assassins, deserves to be ranked with the robber-scenes in the Monk and Count Fathom. The diction of the whole is rich and energetic-not, indeed, flowing in a calm beauty which may glide on for everbut impetuous as a mountain torrent, which, though it speedily passes away, leaves behind it no common spoils

"Depositing upon the silent shore

Of memory, images and gentle thoughts Which cannot die, and will not be destroyed." "The Wild Irish Boy" is, on the whole, inferior to Montorio, though it served to give a farther glimpse into the vast extent of the author's resources. "The Milesian" is, perhaps, the most extraordinary of his romances. There is a bleak and misty grandeur about it, which, in spite of its glaring defects, sustains for it an abiding-place in the soul. Yet never, perhaps, was there a more unequal production

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alternately exhibiting the grossest plagiarism | rendered popular, not by its poetical beauties, and the wildest originality-now swelling into but by the violence with which it jars on the offensive bombast, and anon disclosing the sensibilities, and awakens the sluggish heart simplest majesty of nature, fluctuating with from its lethargy. Manuel," its successor, inconstant ebb between the sublime and the feebler, though in the same style, excited little ridiculous, the delicate and the revolting. | attention, and less sympathy. In “ Fredolpho,” "Women, or Pour et Contre," is less unequal, the author, as though he had resolved to sting but we think, on the whole, less interesting the public into a sense of his power, crowded than the author's earlier productions. He together characters of such matchless deprashould not venture, as in this work he has vity, sentiments of such a demoniac cast, and done, into the ordinary paths of existence. events of such gratuitous horror, that the His persons, if not cast in a high and heroic moral taste of the audience, injured as it had mould, have no stamp of reality upon them. been by the success of similar works, felt the The reader of this work, though often dazzled insult, and rose up indignantly against it. Yet and delighted, has a painful feeling that the in this piece were passages of a soft and characters are shadowy and unreal, like that mournful beauty, breathing a tender air of which is experienced in dreams. They are romance, which led us bitterly to regret that unpleasant and tantalizing likenesses, ap- the poet chose to "embower the spirit of a proaching sufficiently near to the true to make fiend, in mortal paradise of such sweet" song. us feel what they would be and lament what We do not, however despair even yet of the they are. Eva, Žaira, the manaic mother, and regeneration of our author's taste. There has the group of Calvinists, have all a resemblance always been something of humanity to redeem to nature-and sometimes to nature at its most those works in which his genius has been passionate or its sweetest-but they look as at most perverted. There is no deliberate sneera distance from us, as though between us and ing at the disinterested and the pure-no cold them there were some veil, or discolouring derision of human hopes-no deadness to the medium, to baffle and perplex us. Still the lonely and the loving, in his writings. His novel is a splendid work; and gives the feel- error is that of a hasty trusting to feverish iming that its author has "riches fineless" in pulses, not of a malignant design. There is store, which might delight as well as astonish far more of the soul of goodness in his evil the world, if he would cease to be their slave, things, than in those of the noble bard whose and become their master. example has assisted to mislead him. He does In the narrow boundaries of the Drama the not, indeed, know so well how to place his unredundancies of Mr. Maturin have been neces-natural characters in imposing attitudes-to sarily corrected. In this walk, indeed, there seems reason to believe that his genius would have grown purer, as it assumed a severer attitude; and that he would have sought to attain high and true passion, and lofty imagination, had he not been seduced by the admi-ing more extensive. Happy shall we be to see ration unhappily lavished on Lord Byron's writings. The feverish strength, the singular blending of good and evil, and the spirit of moral paradox, displayed in these works, were congenial with his tastes, and aroused in him the desire to imitate. "Bertram," his first and most successful tragedy, is a fine piece of writing, wrought out of a nauseous tale, and

work up his morbid sensibilities for sale-or to "build the lofty rhyme" on shattered principles, and the melancholy fragments of hope. But his diction is more rich, his fancy is more fruitful, and his compass of thought and feel

him doing justice at last to his powersstudying not to excite the wonder of a few barren readers or spectators, but to live in the hearts of the good of future times–and, to this high end, leaving discord for harmony, the startling for the true, and the evil which, however potent, is but for a season, for the pure and the holy which endure for ever'

REVIEW OF RYMER'S WORKS ON TRAGEDY.

[RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW.]

THESE are very curious and edifying works. The author (who was the compiler of the Fadera) appears to have been a man of considerable acuteness, maddened by a furious zeal for the honour of tragedy. He lays down the most fantastical rules for the composition which he chiefly reverses, and argues on them as " truths of holy writ." He criticises Shakspeare as one invested with authority to sit in judgment on his powers, and passes on him as decisive a sentence of condemnation, as ever was awarded against a friendless poet by a Re

viewer. We will select a few passages from his work, which may be consolatory to modern authors and useful to modern critics.

The chief weight of Mr. Rymer's critical vengeance is wreaked on Othello. After a slight sketch of the plot, he proceeds at once to speak of the moral, which he seems to regard as of the first importance in tragedy.

"Whatever rubs or difficulty may stick on the bark, the moral use of this fable is very instructive. First, this may be a caution to all maidens of quality, how, without their parents'