REEVE, Clara, the ingenious authoress of The Old English Baron, was the daughter of the Reverend William Reeve, rector of Freston, and of Kerton, in Suffolk, and perpetual curate of St Nicholas. Her mother’s maiden name was Smithies, daughter of Mr Smithies, goldsmith and jeweller to George I. The father of Miss Reeve was “an old Whig,” and from him she learned all that she knew; he was her oracle, and used to make her readl the parliamentary debates whilst he smoked his pipe after supper. Under the same paternal tuition, she also read Rapin’s History of England, Cato’s Letters, the Greek and Roman histories, and Plutarch’s Lives, at an age when few people of either sex can read their own names. Mr Reeve, himself one of a family of eight children, had the same number of offspring; and hence it is probable that Clara’s strong natural turn for study, rather than any degree of exclusive care which his partiality could bestow, enabled her to acquire such a stock of early information.

After the death of Mr Reeve, his widow resided in Colchester with three of his daughters; and it was here that Clara first became an authoress, by translating from the original Latin Barclay’s fine old romance of Argenis, which was published in 1762, under the title of The Phoenix. It was not, however, until 1767, five years afterwards, that she produced her first and most distinguished work, which was published by Mr Dilly of the Poultry, under the title of The Champion of Virtue. The sum given for the copyright was only ten pounds; but in the following year the work came to a second edition, and was then first called The Old English Baron, for what reason we do not pretend to conjecture. This production is inscribed to Mrs Brigden, the daughter of Richardson, who is stated to have lent some assistance in the revision and correction of the work.

The success of The Old English Baron encouraged Miss Reeve to devote more of her leisure hours to literary composition, and accordingly she published in succession, The Two Mentors, The Progress of Romance, The Exile, The School for Widows, Plans of Education, and Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon, a natural son of the Black Prince, with Anecdotes of many other eminent persons of the fourteenth century. To these works there remains to be added another, the interest of which turned upon supernatural appearances. In a preface to a subsequent edition of The Old English Baron, Miss Reeve informs the public that, in compliance with the suggestion of a friend, she had composed Castle Connor, an Irish story, in which apparitions were introduced. But the manuscript being intrusted to some careless or unfaithful person, fell aside, and was never recovered. The various novels produced by this lady are all marked by excellent good sense, pure morality, and a considerable command of those qualities requisite to constitute a good romance. They were, generally speaking, favourably received at the time; but none of them took the same strong possession of the public mind as The Old English Baron, upon which the fame of the author may be considered as now exclusively rested, and by which alone 6he will be known to posterity.

Miss Reeve led a retired life, affording no materials for biography, until the beginning of December 1803, when she died at Ipswich, her native city, at the advanced age of seventy-eight years, and was buried in the churchyard of St Stephens, according to her particular direction. Such are the only particulars that have been collected concerning this accomplished and excellent woman; and, in their simplicity, the reader may remark that of her life and her character. The following critical observations, confined entirely to her most celebrated work, which first established her fame, and upon which alone it will in all probability rest, are extracted from the biographical notice of Miss Reeve by Sir Walter Scott, to which we have also been in-* debted for the foregoing particulars of her life.

“The authoress has herself informed us that The Old English Baron is the * literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto ;’ and she has obliged us by pointing out the different and more limited view which she had adopted, of the supernatural machinery employed by Horace Walpole. She condemns the latter for the extravagance of several of his conceptions; for the gigantic size of his sword and helmet; and for the violent fictions of a walking picture, and a skeleton in a hermit’s cowl. A ghost, she contends, to be admitted as an ingredient in romance, must behave himself like ghosts of sober demeanour, and subject himself to the common rules still preserved in grange and hall, as circumscribing beings of his description.
[7:19:86]

“We must, however, notwithstanding her authority, enter our protest against fettering the realm of shadows by the opinions entertained of it in the world of realities. If we are to try ghosts by the ordinary rules of humanity, we bar them of their privileges entirely. For instance, why admit the existence of an aerial phantom, and deny it the terrible attribute of magnifying its stature? why admit an enchanted helmet, and not a gigantic one? why allow as an impressive incident the fall of a suit of armour, thrown down, we must suppose, by no mortal hand, and at the same time deny the same supernatural influence the power of producing the illusion (for it is only represented as such) upon Manfred, which gives seeming motion and life to the portrait of his ancestor? It may be said, and it seems to be Miss Reeve’s argument, that there is a verge of probability, which even the most violent figment must not transgress; but we reply by the cross question, that if we are once to subject our preternatural agents to the limits of human reason, where are we to stop? We might, under such a rule, demand of ghosts an account of the very circuitous manner in which they are pleased to open their communications with the living world. We might, for example, move a quo warranto against the spectre of the murdered Lord Lovel, for lurking about the eastern apartment, when it might have been reasonably expected, that if he did not at once impeach his murderers to the next magistrate, he might at least have put Fitzowen into the secret, and thus obtained the succession of his son more easily than by the dubious and circuitous route of a single combat. If there should be an appeal against this imputation, founded on the universal practice of ghosts, in such circumstances, who always act with singular obliquity in disclosing the guilt of which they complain, the matter becomes a question of precedent; in which view of the case, we may vindicate Horace Walpole for the gigantic exaggeration of his phantom, by the similar expansion of the terrific vision of Fa-doun, in Blind Harry’s Life of Wallace; and we could, were we so disposed, have paralleled his moving picture, by the example of one with which we ourselves had some acquaintance, which was said both to move and to utter groans, to the great alarm of a family of the highest respectability.

“Where, then, may the reader ask, is the line to be drawn? or what are the limits to be placed to the reader’s credulity, when those of common sense and ordinary nature are once extended? The question admits only one answer, namely, that the author himself, being in fact the magician, shall evoke no spirits whom he is not capable of endowing with manners and language corresponding to their supernatural character. Thus Shakspeare, drawing such characters as Caliban and Ariel, gave them reality, not by appealing to actual opinions, which his audience might entertain respecting the possibility or impossibility of their existence, but by investing them with such attributes as all readers and spectators recognised as those which must have corresponded to such extraordinary beings, had their existence been possible. If he had pleased to put into language the ‘ squeaking and gibbering* of those disembodied phantoms which haunted the streets of Rome, no doubt his wonderful imagination could have filled up the sketch which, marked by these two emphatic and singularly felicitous expressions, he has left as characteristic of the language of the dead.

“In this point of view, our authoress has, with equal judgment and accuracy, confined her flight within those limits on which her pinions could support her; and though we are disposed to contest her general principle, we are willing to admit it as a wise and prudent one, so far as applied to regulate her own composition. In no part of The Old English Baron, or of any other of her works, does Miss Reeve show the possession of a rich or powerful imagination. Her dialogue is sensible, easy, and agreeable, but neither marked by high flights of fancy nor strong bursts of passion. Her apparition is an ordinary fiction, of which popular superstition used to furnish a thousand instances, when nights were long, and a family, assembled round a Christmas log, had little better to do than to listen to such tales. Miss Reeve has been very felicitously cautious in showing us no more of Lord Lovel’s ghost than she needs must; he is a silent apparition, palpable to the sight only, and never brought forward into such broad daylight as might have dissolved our reverence. And so far, we repeat, the authoress has used her own power to the utmost advantage, and gained her point by not attempting a step beyond it. But we cannot allow that the rule which, in her own case, has been well and wisely adopted, ought to circumscribe a bolder and more imaginative writer.

“In what may be called the costume, or keeping, of the chivalrous period in which tile scene of both is laid, the language and style of Horace Walpole, together with his intimate acquaintance with the manners of the middle ages, form an incalculable difference betwixt The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron. Clara Reeve, probably, was better acquainted with Plutarch and Rapin than with Froissart or Olivier de la Marche. This is no imputation on the taste of that ingenious lady. In her days, Macbeth was performed in a general’s full uniform, and Lord Hastings was dressed like a modern high chamberlain going to court. Or, if she looked to romances for her authority, those of the French school were found introducing, under the reign of Cyrus or of Faramond, or in the early republic at Rome, the sentiments and manners of the court of Louis XIV. In the present day more attention to costume is demanded, and authors, as well as players, are obliged to make attempts, however fantastic or grotesque, to imitate the manners on the one hand, and the dress on the other, of the times in which the scene is laid. Formerly, nothing of this kind was either required or expected; and it is not improbable that the manner in which Walpole circumscribes his dialogue (in most instances) within the stiff and stem precincts prescribed by a strict attention to the manners and language of the times, is the first instance of such restrictions. In The Old English Baron, on the contrary, all parties speak and act much in the fashion of the seventeenth century; employ the same phrases of courtesy; and adopt the same tone of conversation. Baron Fitzowen 1 and the principal characters, talk after the fashion of country squires of that period, and the lower personages like gaffers and gammers of the same era. And ‘ were but the combat in the lists left out,’ or converted into a modem duel, the whole train of incidents might, for any peculiarity to be traced in the dialect or narration, have taken place in the time of Charles II., or in either of the two succeeding reigns. As it is, the story reads as if it had been transcribed into the language, and remodelled according to the ideas, of this latter period. Yet we are uncertain whether, upon the whole, this does not rather add to than dimmish the interest of the work; at least it gives an interest of a different kind, which, if it cannot compete with that which arises out of a highly exalted and poetical imagination, and a strict attention to the character and manners of the middle ages, has yet this advantage, that it reaches its point more surely than had a higher, more difficult, and more ambitious line of composition been attempted.

“He that would please the modern world, yet present the exact impression of a tale of the middle ages, will repeatedly find that he will be obliged, in despite of his utmost exertions, to sacrifice the last to the first object, and eternally expose himself to the just censure of the rigid antiquary, because he must, to interest the readers of the present time, invest his characters with language and sentiments unknown to the period assigned to his story; and [7:19:87]thus his utmost efforts only attain a sort of composition ' between the true and the fictitious, just as the dress of Lear, as performed on the stage, is neither that of a modem sovereign, nor the cerulean painting and bear-hide with which the Britons, at the time when that monarch is supposed to have lived, tattooed their persons, and sheltered themselves from cold. All this inconsistency is avoided by adopting the style of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, sufficiently antiquated to accord with the antiquated character of the narrative, yet copious enough to express all that is necessary to its interest, and to supply that deficiency of colouring which the more ancient times do not afford.

“It is no doubt true that The Old English Baron, written in the latter and less ambitious taste, is sometimes tame and tedious, not to say mean and tiresome. The total absence of peculiar character (for every person introduced is rather described as one of a genus than as an original, discriminated, and individual person) may have its effect in producing the tedium which loads the story in some places. This is a general defect in the novels of the period, and it was scarce to be expected that the amiable and accomplished authoress, in her secluded situation, and with acquaintance of events and characters derived from books alone, should have rivalled those authors who gathered their knowledge of the human heart from having, like Fielding and Smollett, become acquainted, by sad experience, with each turn of ‘ many-coloured life.’ Nor was it to be thought that she should have emulated in this particular her prototype Walpole, who, as a statesman, a poet, and a man of the world, ‘ who knew the world like a man,’ has given much individual character to his sketch of Manfred. What we here speak of is not the deficiency in the style and costume, but a certain creeping and low line of narrative and sentiment; which may be best illustrated by the grave and minute accounting into which Sir Philip Harclay and the Baron Fitzowen enter, after an event so unpleasant as the judgment of heaven upon a murderer, brought about by a judicial combat, and that combat occasioned by the awful and supernatural occurrences in the eastern chamber, where we find the arrears of the estate gravely set off against the education of the heir, and his early maintenance in the baron’s family. Yeteven these prolix, minute, and unnecessary details are precisely such as would occur in a similar story told by a grandsire or grandame to a circle assembled round a winter’s fire; and while they take from the dignity of the composition, and would therefore have been rejected by a writer of more exalted imagination, do certainly add in some degree to its reality, and bear in that respect a resemblance to the art with which De Foe impresses on his readers the truth of his fictions, by the insertion of many minute and immaterial or unnatural circumstances, which we are led to suppose could only be recorded because they are trae. Perhaps, to be circumstantial and abundant in minute detail, and, in one word, though an unauthorized one, to be somewhat prosy, is a secret mode of securing a certain necessary degree of credulity from the hearers of a ghost-story. It gives a sort of quaint antiquity to the whole, as belonging to the times of , superstitious elde ;’ and those whom we have observed to excel in oral narratives of such a nature, usually study to secure the attention of their audience by employing this art. At least, whether owing to this mode of telling her tale, or to the interest of the story itself, and its appeal to the secret reserve of superstitious feeling which maintains its influence in most bosoms, The Old English Baron has always produced as strong an effect as any story of the kind, although liable to the objections which we have freely stated, without meaning to impeach the talents of the amiable authoress.” (a.)