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'Antonina.'

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poraries: but we must not suppose them to have been restrained by all the sanctions which the code of modern practice owes to Christianity. In defending them, all that we have to do is to ignore such charges as the enlightened conscience of their time would have felt to be criminal imputations. Socrates we may believe to have been really pure in heart and life, in spite of the strange company into which his genial humanity sometimes led him: but he lived under a moral rule which was confessedly peculiar, and to which even Plato does not appear to have surrendered himself. The misrepresentation is of some consequence, not only as effacing an historical characteristic, but as hiding the glory no less than the shame of the Athenian character. It is no light proof of the mental greatness of a nation that it should have exhibited so much sensuality even among its best natures, and yet remained so noble. Roman civilisation attempted to run a similar course and failed, sinking at once to a level which contains no place for sympathy or toleration. Time accordingly has made a difference in its awards: we can think of Athens without remembering its worst vices, but the moral degradation of imperial Rome is never forgotten. If we miss in Thucydides, who was not blind to the other faults of his countrymen, an account of their social state, the omission may serve to remind us that there was no such conscious demoralisation as that which is forced upon our notice in every page of Tacitus. Mr. Collins, choosing a subject from those dark days in depicting which Gibbon has earned his fame, has been led not more by his own truthfulness of observation than by the imperative demands of facts, to touch on some of the deeper stains of national pollution. Our authors seem quite aware that Athenian life had its shades: Cleon, who is drawn in all the breadth of the vulgar conception of his character, appears as the brutal villain of Amymone,' the more harmless debauchee of Pericles :' but such personages are no more than modern society can show, while the halo which is cast round the men and women of finer clay serves to produce not so much a more striking as a less genuine contrast. As it happens, the superficiality of the writer in this case is fortunately balanced by that of the ordinary reader, who might have some difficulty in appreciating the excellence of the Athenian worthies, if he were informed of all concerning them: but even if such a condescension to popular ignorance had been intended, it must be reckoned a poor set-off against the perpetuation of error, and the neglect of the instruction which was to have been derived from a faithful exhibition of the truth.

'Antonina' contains more of the requisites for general and

respectable popularity than either of the works which we have noticed, perhaps than any classical romance of recent date. Its descriptive style is as eloquent, though not so uniformly impassioned, as that of Amymone,' while in historical truthfulness it is at least equal to 'Pericles.' In literary skill and adroitness of management, it must be admitted to be superior to them both. Mr. Collins has shown his judgment not only in overcoming but in declining some of the difficulties encountered by his predecessors. The period which he has chosen is more tractable in itself; as the external forms of society in the Christianised empire happen to be at once more like our own and more patient of a somewhat vague rhetorical handling than the sharp and pronounced characteristics of Athens in its prime. The principles' too on which he has written show equal discretion, having induced him to represent not actual but imaginary characters, in other words, not the leading men, but the general society of the day, and thus to avoid an unfavourable comparison both with historic greatness and historic fact. The result is a pleasing amplification of Gibbon, preserving the outline of his narrative as a background, and developing the hints furnished by his more general views into a plot and a cast of characters good in themselves and sufficiently suitable to the time. The obvious points, chiefly of contrast, are judiciously seized and effectively presented; the conflict between the old and the new being exhibited in the person of the invaders and the invaded, and also within the walls in the opposition between Christianity and a still reluctant Paganism. These broader features are yet further diversified in detail: we have a Gothic matron, implacable in her revenge against the murderers of her kindred, and her brother, a young chief, forgetting his duties as a warrior in his passion for a daughter of the enemy: we have a pureminded Roman girl, and a voluptuous senator; an ascetic father, ill suited to educate a nature full of susceptibility and enthusiasm for Art; and, as further foils to him, a self-seeking and corrupt priesthood of his own faith, and a pretended convert. pretended convert turns out to be a savagely sincere pagan, who again is himself confronted with the indifference of a dilettante favourer of the old belief and with the relentless reality of Gothic contempt. But it is of course impossible in a single sentence to express with decent perspicuity the complication of the story, or even to enumerate the impressive situations and the strokes of tragic irony which such materials, in the hands of a skilful workman, might be expected to produce. A tolerable specimen of the writing may be seen in the subjoined sketch, which accompanies the first introduction of the senatorial Epicurean already referred to.

The

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At most periods of the world, modern or ancient, the historical student will perceive the existence of a certain class of men, one great object of whose creation appears to have been to supply posterity with the most striking and complete examples of the influence of the age on the individual. Of such an order was the senator Vetranio. Under the flimsy superstructure of this man's laborious trifling and elaborate profligacy lay concealed a powerful and profound intellect, the legitimate cravings of which, unanswered in those degenerate times, were either destroyed by privation, or deceived into a relish for the intellectual garbage of the age. Rather reflective than active, rather imitative than creative, too pliable for resistance, and too social for solitude, his was not the understanding which out of itself can supply its own wants, which asks from the world without neither inspiration nor sympathy, and which glories in the loneliness inherited by its own ungenial aspirations, or created by its own unwelcome achievements. Like an inland sea, his mind lay calm in itself, among those external influences that alone could rouse it to action, or lash it into grandeur. But the storm of mighty actions or great examples, at that worthless period, never impelled it to cast up its hidden treasures to the day, never agitated it to its inmost depths. Over its indolent surface there passed but the little breeze of luxury, or there rose but the puny wavelet of accomplishments. And thus, intellectually crippled beneath the degenerate influences of his age, this man, who in other times might have led the destinies of an empire, found in his own no brighter distinction than the rule over jesters, and no nobler ambition than the supremacy among cooks.'

It would have been fairer to Mr. Collins, perhaps, to have quoted one of his more striking scenes, such as the 'Banquet of Famine,' in the third volume, rather than a passage which, especially if taken alone, may be set down as a somewhat overdone piece of rhetoric, savouring in one or two expressions of the taste of the age which it portrays; but our space will not permit us to transcribe episodes extending page after page, and there is enough in what we have extracted to show that the author has a certain power both of conception and of expression. We should add, too, that Mr. Collins not only tells us about his characters, but makes them exhibit themselves in action as much as in language. None of the others, perhaps, are so well imagined or executed as Vetranio. Antonina and Goisvintha, -the heroine and her would-be murderess-are good as far as they go, but rather common. Numerian and Ulpius, the Christian and Heathen zealots, are in a higher style, but the artist's success is not equal here to his ambition, and he has not penetrated beyond their more obvious traits; while Hermanric, the Gothic lover, displays a dreamy sentimentalism, ill accounted for by the Roman fervour,' with which his passion is said to inspire him. Altogether the romance is one which shows literary craft rather

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than genuine mastery over either history or human nature: and the artifices by which the style is diversified are too conventional. An author has not thrown himself into his subject with the necessary abandonment, when he can make apologies to his readers, and assure them that he does not mean to fatigue them. Miss Lynn's sustained enthusiasm is more wearisome, but it proves her to be in a kind of earnest. It may be said, however, and with some justice, that the levity against which we are taking exception is not out of place in a book meant to be read and laid down again. Mr. Collins, in the preface to his second edition, evidently seems to recollect that a more serious tone might be more decorous in a successful author who has a glimpse of permanent fame. The earlier calculation is, however, we suspect, the truer of the two. To be really valuable, an historical fiction must not leave our conceptions of a period exactly where the last great historian placed them. Antonina' has earned for itself popularity in England, and possibly an introduction into Germany; but we should hesitate in adjudging it a more decided apotheosis.

6

Less adapted to make an impression on the ordinary reader, Mr. Robert Landor's fictions are of a much higher order than the rest of those which have suggested to us our present subject. Like his brother, he does not care to fall in with the humours of his time, though he has not made any open profession of his disregard. Southey, the admired and admirer of both, has declared, that there is, perhaps, no other instance of so strongly marked an intellectual family likeness. Mr. Robert Landor modestly disclaims the compliment which this implies, saying, that the Laureat must have meant only such a resemblance as often ' exists between great things and little.' There is so far truth as well as humility in the disclaimer, that Mr. Robert Landor does not show that rough and untamed vigour, that strong but warped individuality, for which his brother's writings are so remarkable. We are speaking without any knowledge of his early life and fortunes, when we venture to assume that he must throughout have lived in greater charity with his generation. His intellectual habits may have been the same, but he has evidently followed them in much less of an antagonistic spirit; not flying in anger to the wilderness, but retiring quietly into congenial seclusion. His real sphere must have been not Italy, but his own Worcestershire parish. However this may be, there is certainly enough resemblance to make it probable that the works of the less known. brother should be attributed to the better known, as seems to have been the case with The Fawn of Sertorius.' Both seem to have studied the classics devotedly, and with the same object, -not as critical scholars or learners merely, but as imitators,

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though one is far more disposed to ambitious rivalry than the other. Both have been rewarded by being allowed to catch, not exactly the classical style, but the classical habit of composition, which differs mainly from the modern in paying much more attention to form, and much less to colour. At first sight

it might appear that they do not sympathise with the same features of ancient life and character; as Mr. Robert Landor has on each occasion chosen a Roman subject, while his brother's predilections appear to have directed him principally to the art and civilisation of Greece. We are not so sure of this: for while we can have no apology to make to the Hellenics,'our admiration of which already stands on record, we fancy we can trace, even in Mr. Savage Landor, more of the Roman than of the Athenian. If he has imitated the Greeks in some of his English works, he has copied the Latins in their own language. Nor would any man who was not strongly biassed in favour of Roman doctrine deliberately prefer Cicero to Plato. On the other hand, Mr. Robert Landor promises, in a second series of The Fountain of Arethusa,' to take us to Athens. Happy as we shall be to meet him again there or anywhere, we do not feel sure that we shall find him as much at home among the wise men of Greece as he is with the consular phantoms of subterranean Rome, or under the banners of Sertorius in Spain. At present, at least, he shows a better eye for the veritable members of the Roman congress than for Alexander or Aristotle. Not but that in him too, as well as in the rest of our romance writers, there is a little of the modern antique. His views of classical life not unfrequently seem as if taken from the level of the last century, which may be symbolised by his supposed brother-in-law's terrace with its urns and balustrades. study of Roman history, accurate and extensive as it has been, bears signs of having been commenced in an age when the echoes of Goldsmith had not been forgotten. Even in the lower world, Roman citizens would start at finding themselves written down as J. Cæsar and M. T. Cicero; especially if endowed with a faultless and uncompromising memory. The plan of the Fawn' is a direct contrast to that of the Fountain,' -the one being professedly a rechauffe of a recovered Roman MS., the other as palpably a narrative of exceedingly modern experience; yet, unless we are mistaken, the former contains a prophecy, conscious or unconscious, of the latter in the dialogue between Orcilis, Sertorius, Virgilia, and Myrtilis. In speculating on what may lie hid behind the veil, their anticipations point more directly to the solutions which Christianity was to provide for heathen problems, than they could have done had they been actually conceived by Roman heroes or Spanish ladies