carry the same prospect with you, like a map in your hand, the whole way. Mr Godwin has laid no ambuscade for the unwary reader-no picturesque group greets the eye as you pass on-no sudden turn at an angle places you on the giddy verge of a precipice. Nevertheless, our author's courage never flags. Mr Godwin is an eminent rhetorician; and he shows it in this, that he expatiates, discusses, amplifies, with equal fervour, and unabated ingenuity, on the merest accidents of the way-side, or common-places of human life. Thus, for instance, if a youth of eleven or twelve years of age is introduced upon the carpet, the author sets himself to show, with a laudable candour and communicativeness, what the peculiar features of that period of life are, and takes an inventory' of all the particulars,—such as sparkling eyes, roses in the cheeks, a smooth forehead, flaxen locks, elasticity of limb, lively animal spirits, and all the flush of hope, as if he were describing a novelty, or some terra incognita, to the reader. In like manner, when a young man of twenty is confined in a dungeon as belonging to a gang of banditti, and going to be hanged, great pains are taken through three or four pages to convince us, that at that period of life this is no very agreeable prospect; that the feelings of youth are more acute and sanguine than those of age; that, therefore, we are to take a due and proportionate interest in the tender years and blighted hopes of the younger Cloudesley; and that if any means could be found to rescue him from his present perilous situation, it would be a great relief, not only to him, but to all humane and compassionate persons. Every man's strength is his weakness, and turns in some way or other against himself. Mr Godwin has been so long accustomed to trust to his own powers, and to draw upon his own resources, that he comes at length to imagine that he can build a palace of words upon nothing. When he lavished the colours of style, and the exuberant strength of his fancy, on descriptions like those of the character of Margaret, the wife of St Leon, or of his musings in the dungeon of Bethlem Gabor, or of his enthusiasm on discovering the philosopher's stone, and being restored to youth and the plenitude of joy by drinking the Elixir Vita ;-or when he recounts the long and lasting despair which succeeded that utter separation from his kind, and that deep solitude which followed him into crowds and cities,-deeper and more appalling than the dungeon of Bethlem Gabor,-we were never weary of being borne along by the golden tide of eloquence, supplied from the true sources of passion and feeling. But when he bestows the same elaboration of phrases, and artificial arrangement of sentences, to set off the most trite and obvious truisms, we confess it has to us a striking

effect of the bathos. Lest, however, we should be thought to have overcharged or given a false turn to this description, we will enable our readers to judge for themselves, by giving the passage to which we have just alluded, as a specimen of this overstrained and supererogatory style.

The condition in which he was now placed could not fail to have a memorable effect on the mind of Julian. Shut up in a solitary dungeon, without exercise or amusement, he had nothing upon which to occupy his thoughts but the image of his own situation. He had hitherto lived, particularly during the last twelve months, in a dream. He grieved most bitterly, most persistingly, for the death of Cloudesley (the elder). He had been instigated by his grief to seek the society of the companions he had left in the Apennines. He did not desire any new connexions; he would have shrunk from the encounter of new faces.

All this was well. But the case was different, when he understood from the language and manner of those who had him in custody, the only persons he saw, that he would probably barely be taken out of prison to be led to the scaffold. This was a kind of shock, greatly calculated to awaken a man out of a dream. Julian was young, and had seen little of the diversified scenes of human life. Existence is a thing that is regarded in a very different light by the young and the old. The springs of human nature are of a limited sort, and lie in a narrow compass; and when we grow old, our desires are declining, our faculties have lost their sharpness, and we are reasonably contented" to close our eyes and shut out daylight." But to the young it is a very different thing, particularly perhaps at twenty years of age. We are just come into the possession of all our faculties, and begin fully to be aware of our own independence. Every thing is new to us; and the larger half at least of what is new, is also agreeable. Pleasure spreads before us all its allurements; knowledge unrolls its ample page. We have every thing to learn, and every thing to enjoy. Ambition proffers its variegated visions; and we are at a loss on which side to fix our choice. It is easy to dally with death. The young man is like the coquette of the other sex: She has little objection to trifling with a displeasing and superannuated lover, so long as she is satisfied she is not within his clutches.

But all these considerations sink into nothing when contrasted with the horrible death that was prepared for him. Julian had hitherto been a stranger to adversity and pain. The path of his juvenile years had been smoothed to him by the exemplary cares of Cloudesley and Eudocia. To h's own apprehension he was the favourite of fortune. All that he had read of tragic and disastrous in the annals of mankind, seemed like a drama, prepared to make him wise by the sorrows of others, without costing him a particle of the bitter price of experience. All that he had encountered of displeasing was when he was the inmate of Borromeo; and this, though felt by him as intolerable, he was aware had been planned in a spirit of kindness. How terrible, therefore, was the reverse that had now fallen upon him! That he, who had never contemplated the slightest mischief to a human creature, whose life had been all kindness,

and beneficence, and good-humour, should suddenly be treated as the vilest of criminals, shut up in a dungeon, and destined to the scaffold, was a thought that overturned all his previous conceptions of human society and life. It filled him with wildness and horror; it drove him to frenzy. From time to time he was ready to burst into paroxysm, and dash out his desperate brains against the bars of his prison. To exchange the most beautiful scene that Paradise ever exhibited, for utter desolation and tremendous hurricane, that should tear up rocks from their foundations, and overwhelm the produce of the earth with rushing and uncontrollable waves, would feebly express the revolution that took place in his mind. He repented that he had ever again sought the society of these alluring but pernicious friends.'-Vol. III. p. 288.

Was so much circumlocution necessary to prove that it is a disagreeable thing to be shut up in a prison, and led out to the gallows? This is the style of the orator, where the whole object is to turn a plain moral adage in as many different ways as possible, and not that of the romance-writer, who has, or ought to have, too many rare and surprising adventures on his hands, to stoop to this trifling, snail-paced method. According to the foregoing studied description, it should seem, that for a man to feel shocked at being immured in a gaol, or broke on the wheel, is 'a pass of wit.' When the author has conjured up all the aggravations of the particular case, and compared it to the nicest shade of difference with his former or his future possible history, he then feels satisfied that his hero would like it little better than he does, and inflicts a tardy horror and repentance on him. With submission, this may be the scholastic or rational process for exciting pity and terror; nature takes a shorter cut, and jumps at a conclusion without all this formality and cool calculation of grains and scruples in the scale of misfortune.

We have a graver charge yet to bring against Mr Godwin on the score of style, than that it leads him into useless amplification from his desire to load and give effect to his descriptions, he runs different characters and feelings into one another. By not stopping short of excess and hyperbole, he loses the line of distinction, and 'o'ersteps the modesty of nature.' All his characters are patterns of vice or virtue. They are carried to extremes, they are abstractions of woe, miracles of wit and gaiety, -gifted with every grace and accomplishment that can be enumerated in the same page; and they are not only prodigies in themselves, but destined to immortal renown, though we have never heard of their names before. This is not like a veteran in the art, but like the raptures of some boarding-school girl in love with every new face or dress she sees. It is difficult to say which is the most extraordinary genius,—the improvisatori Ber

nardino Perfetti, or his nephew, Francesco, or young Julian. Mr Godwin still sees with eyes of youth.' Irene is a Greek, the model of beauty and of conjugal faith. Eudocia, her maid, who marries the elder Cloudesley, is a Greek too, and nearly as handsome and as exemplary in her conduct. Again, on the same principle, the account of Irene's devotion to her father and her husband, is by no means clearly discriminated. The spiritual feeling is exaggerated till it is confounded with the passionate; and the passionate is spiritualized in the same incontinence of tropes and figures, till it loses its distinctive character. Each sentiment, by being over-done, is neutralized into a sort of platonics. It is obvious to remark, that the novel of Cloudesley has no hero, no principal figure. The attention is divided, and wavers between Meadows, who is a candidate for the reader's sympathy through the first half volume, and whose affairs and love adventures at St Petersburg are huddled up in haste, and broke off in the middle; Lord Danvers, who is the guilty sufferer; Cloudesley, his sullen, dilatory Mentor; and Julian, (the supposed offspring of Cloudesley, but real son of Lord Alton, and nephew of Lord Danvers,) who turns out the fortunate youth of the piece. The story is awkwardly told. Meadows begins it with an account of himself, and a topographical description of the Russian empire, which has nothing to do with the subject; and nearly through the remainder of the work, listens to a specch of Lord Danvers, recounting his own history and that of Julian, which lasts for six hundred pages without interruption or stop. It is the longest parenthesis in a narrative that ever was known. Meadows then emerges from his incognito once more, as if he had been hid behind a curtain, and gives the coup-de-grace to his own auto-biography, and the lingering sufferings of his patron. The plot is borrowed from a real event that took place concerning a disputed succession in the middle of the last century, and which gave birth not long after to a novel with the title of Annesley. We should like to meet with a copy of this work, in order to see how a writer of less genius would get to the end of his task, and carry the reader along with him without the aid of those subtle researches and lofty declamations with which Mr Godwin has supplied the place of facts and circumstances. The published trial, we will hazard a conjecture, has more mark and likelihood' in it. This is the beauty of Sir Walter Scott: he takes a legend or an actual character as he finds it, while other writers think they have not performed their engagements and acquitted themselves with applause, till they have slobbered over the plain face of nature with paint and varnish of their own. They conceive that truth is a

plagiarism, and the thing as it happened a forgery and imposition on the public. They stand right before their subject, and say, Nay, but hear me first!' We know no other merit in the Author of Waverley than that he is never this opaque, obtrusive body, getting in the way and eclipsing the sun of truth and nature, which shines with broad universal light through his different works. If we were to describe the secret of this author's success in three words, we should say, that it consists in the absence of egotism.

Mr Godwin, in his preface, remarks, that as Caleb Williams was intended as a paraphrase of " Blue Beard," the present work may be regarded as a paraphrase of the story of the "Children in the Wood." Multum abludit imago. He has at least contrived to take the sting of simplicity out of it. It is a very adult, selfconscious set of substitutes he has given us for the two children, wandering hand in hand, the robin-redbreast, and their leafy bed. The grand eloquence, the epic march of Cloudesley, is beyond the ballad-style. In a word, the fault of this and some other of the author's productions is, that the critical and didactic part overlays the narrative and dramatic part; as we see in some editions of the poets, where there are two lines of original text, and the rest of the page is heavy with the lumber and pedantry of the commentators. The writer does not call characters from the dead, or conjure them from the regions of fancy, to paint their peculiar physiognomy, or tell us their story, so much as (like the anatomist) to dissect and demonstrate on the insertion of the bones, the springs of the muscles, and those understood principles of life and motion which are common to the species. Now, in a novel, we want the individual, and not the genus. The tale of Cloudesley is a dissertation on remorse. Besides, this truth of science is often a different thing from the truth of nature, which is modified by a thousand accidents, subject to all 'the skyey influences;'-not a mechanical principle, brooding over and working every thing out of itself. Nothing, therefore, gives so little appearance of a resemblance to reality as this abstract identity and violent continuity of purpose. Not to say that this cutting up and probing of the internal feelings and motives, without a reference to external objects, tends, like the operations of the anatomist, to give a morbid and unwholesome taint to the surrounding atmosphere.

Mr Godwin's mind is, we conceive, essentially active, and therefore may naturally be expected to wear itself out sooner than those that are passive to external impressions, and receive continual new accessions to their stock of knowledge and acquire

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