ROMANCE.

Dr. Johnson has defined Romance, in its primary sense, to be “a military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in love and chivalry.” But although this definition expresses correctly the ordinary idea of the word, it is not sufficiently comprehensive to answer our present purpose. A composition may be a legitimate romance, yet neither refer to love nor chivalry—to war nor to the middle ages. The “wild adventures” are almost the only absolutely essential ingredient in Johnson’s definition. We would be rather inclined to describe a Romance as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents ;” being thus opposed to the kindred term Novel, which Johnson has described as “a smooth tale, generally of love ;” but which we would rather define as “a fictitious narrative, differing from the romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society.” Assuming these definitions, it is evident, from the nature of the distinction adopted, that there may exist compositions which it is difficult to assign precisely or exclusively to the one class or other; and which, in fact, partake of the nature of both. But the distinction will, be found broad enough to answer all general and useful purposes.

The word Romance, in its original meaning, was far from corresponding with the definition now assigned. On the contrary, it signified merely one or other of the popular dialects of Europe, founded, as almost all these dialects were, upon the Roman tongue, that is, upon the Latin. The name of romance was indiscriminately given to the Italian, to the Spanish, even, in one remarkable instance at least, ^[1. This curious passage was detected by the industry of Ritson in Giraldus Cambrensis, “Ab aqua illa optima, qua Scottice vocata est Froth; Brittanice, Weird; Romane vero Scotte-Wattre." Here the various names assigned to the Frith of Forth are given in the Gaelic or Enrse, the British or Welsh; and the phrase Roman is applied to the ordinary language of England. But it would be difficult to shew another instance of the English language being termed Roman or Romance. ] to the English language. But it was especially applied to the compound language of France; in which the Gothic dialect of the Franks, the Celtic of the ancient Gauls, and the classical Latin, formed the ingredients. Thus Robert De Brunne:

"All is calde geste Inglis,

That en this language spoken is—

Frankis speech is caled Romance.

So sayis clerkis and men of France."

At a period so early as 1150, it plainly appears that the Romance language was distinguished from the Latin, and that translations were made from the one into the other; for an ancient romance on the subject of Alexander, quoted by Fauchet, says it was written by a learned clerk,

“Qui de Latin la trest, et en Roman la mit."

The most noted romances of the middle ages were usually composed in the romance or French language, which was, in a peculiar degree, the speech of love and chivalry; and those which are written in English always affect to refer to some French original, which usually, at least, if not in all instances, must be supposed to have a real existence. Hence, the frequent recurrence of the phrase,

“As in romance we read Or,

“Right as the romaunt us tells and equivalent phrases, well known to all who have at any time perused such compositions. Thus, very naturally, though, undoubtedly by slow degrees, the very name of romaunt, or romance, came to be transferred from the language itself to that peculiar style of composition in which it was so much employed, and which so commonly referred to it. How early a transference so natural took place, we have no exact means of knowing; but the best authority assures us, that the word was used in its modern sense so early as the reign of Edward III. Chaucer, unable to sleep during the night, informs us, that, in order to pass the time,

“Upon my bed I sate upright:

And bβde one reebin me a hoke,

A Romaunce, and it me took To read and drive the night away."

The book described as a romance contained, as we are informed,

“--Fable»

That clerkis had, in old time,

And other poets, put in rhyme."

And the author tells us a little lower, ,, This book ne spake but of such things,

Of Queens' lives and of Kings."

The volume proves to be no other than Ovid’s Metamor-]>hoses; and Chaucer, by applying to it the name of romance, sufficiently establishes that the word was, in his time, correctly employed under the modern acceptation.

Having thus accounted for the derivation of the word, our investigation divides itself into three principal branches, though of unequal extent. In the first of these we propose to inquire into the general history and origin of this peculiar species of composition, and particularly of romances relating to European chivalry, which necessarily form the most interesting object of our inquiry. In the second, we shall give some brief account of the bistory of the romance of chivalry in the different states of Europe. Thirdly, we propose to notice cursorily the various kinds of romantic composition by which the ancient romances of chivalry were followed and superseded, and with these notices to conclude the article.

I. In the views taken by Hurd, Percy, and other older authorities, of the origin and history of romantic fiction, their attentions were so exclusively fixed upon the romance of chivalry alone, that they appear to have forgotten that, however interesting and peculiar, it formed only one species of a very numerous and extensive genus. The progress of romance, in fact, keeps pace with that of society, which cannot long exist, even in the simplest state, without exhibiting some specimens of this attractive style of composition. It is not meant by this assertion, that in early ages such narratives were invented, in the character of mere fictions, devised to beguile the leisure of those who had time enough to read and attend to them. On the contrary, romance and real history have the same common origin. It is the aim of tile former to maintain as long as possible the mask of veracity; and indeed the traditional memorials of all earlier ages partake in such a varied and doubtful degree of the qualities essential to those opposite lines of composition, that they form a mixed class between them; and may be termed either romantic histories, or historical romances,
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according to the proportion in which their truth is debased by fiction, or their fiction mingled with truth.

A moment’s glance at the origin of society will satisfy the reader why this can hardly be otherwise. The father of an isolated family, destined one day to rise into a tribe, and in further progress of time to expand into a nation, may, indeed, narrate to his descendants the circumstances which detached him from the society of his brethren, and drove him to form a solitary settlement in the wilderness, with no other deviation from truth, on the part of the narrator, than arises from the infidelity of memory, or the exaggerations of vanity. But when the tale of the patriarch is related by his children, and again by his descendants of the third and fourth generation, the facts it contains are apt to assume a very different aspect. The vanity of the tribe augments the simple annals from one cause; the love of the marvellous, so natural to the human mind, contributes its means of sophistication from another; while, sometimes, the king and the priest find their interest in casting a holy and sacred gloom and mystery over the early period in which their power arose. And thus altered and sophisticated from so many different motives, the real adventures of the founder of the tribe bear as little proportion to the legend recited among his children, as the famous hut of Loretto bears to the highly ornamented church with which superstition has surrounded and enchased it. Thus the definition which we have given of Romance as a fictitious narrative turning upon the marvellousorthesupernatural, might, in a large sense, be said to embrace

--quicquid Gracia mendax

Audet in historia, or, in fine, the mythological and fabulous history of all early nations.

It is also important to remark, that poetry, or rather verse, rhythm at least of some sort or other, is originally selected as the best vehicle for these traditional histories. Its principal recommendation is probably the greater facility with which metrical narratives are retained in the memory, a point of the last consequence, until the art of writing is generally introduced; since the construction of the verse itself forms an artificial association with the sense, the one of which seldom fails to recall the other to recollection. But the medium of verse, at first adopted merely to aid the memory, becomes soon valuable on account of its other qualities. The march or measure of the stanza is gratifying to the ear, and, like a natural strain of melody, can be restrained or accelerated, so as to correspond with the tone of feeling which the words convey; while the recurrence of the necessary measure, rhythm or rhyme, is perpetually gratifying the hearer by a sense of difficulty overcome. Verse being thus adopted as the vehicle of traditional history, there needs but the existence of a single man of genius, in order to carry the composition a step higher in the scale of literature than that of which we are treating. In proportion to the skill which he attains in his art, the fancy and ingenuity of the artist himself are excited; the simple narrative transmitted to him by ruder rhymers is increased in length; is decorated with the graces of language, amplified in detail, and rendered interesting by description; until the brief and barren original bears as little resemblance to the finished piece, as the Iliad of Homer to the evanescent traditions, out of which the blind bard wove his tale of Troy Divine. Hence, the opinion expressed by the ingenious Percy, and assented to by Ritson himself. When about to present to his readers an excellent analysis of the old romance of Lybius Disconius, and making several remarks on the artificial management of the story, the Bishop observes, that “if an epic poem may be defined a fable related by a poet to excite admiration and inspire virtue, by representing the action of some one hero favoured by Heaven, who executes a great design in spite of all the obstacles that oppose him, I know not why we should withhold the name of epic poem from the piece which I am about to analyse.” ^[2. Reliques of Ancient EnglishPoeirt), Telemachus. ]

Yet although this levelling proposition has been laid down by Percy, and assented to by Ritson (writers who have few opinions in common,) and although, upon so general a view of the subject, the Iliad, or even the Odyssey of Homer, might be degraded into the class of romances, as Le Beau Deconηu is elevated into that of epic poems, there lies in ordinary speech, and in common sense, as wide a distinction between these two classes of composition, as there is betwixt the rude mystery or morality of the middle ages, and the regular drama by which these were succeeded. Where the art and the ornaments of the poet chiefly attract our attention; where each part of the narrative bears a due proportion to the others, and the whole draw’s gradually towards a final and satisfactory conclusion; where the characters are sketched with force, and sustained with precision; where the narrative is enlivened and adorned with so much, and no more, of poetical ornament and description, as may adorn, without impeding its progress; where this art and taste arc displayed, supported, at the same time, by a sufficient tone of genius, and art of composition, the work produced must be termed an epic poem, and the author may claim his seat upon the high and honoured throne occupied by Homer, Virgil, and Milton. On the other hand, when a story languishes in tedious and minute details, and relies for the interest which it proposes to excite, rather upon the wild excursions of an unbridled fancy, than upon the skill of the poet; when the supernatural and the extraordinary are relied upon exclusively as the supports of the interest, the author, though his production may be distinguished by occasional flashes of genius, and though it may be interesting to the historian, as containing some minute fragments of real events, and still more so to the antiquary, from the light which it throws upon ancient manners, is still no more than a humble romancer, and his work must rank amongst those rude ornaments of a dark age, which are at present the subject of our consideration. Betwixt the extremes of the two classes of composition, there must, no doubt, exist many works, which partake in some degree of the character of both; and after having assigned most of them, each to their proper class, according as they are distinguished by regularity of composition and poetical talent, or, on the contrary, by extravagance of imagination, and· irregularity of detail, there may still remain some, in which these properties are so equally balanced, that it may be difficult to say to which class they belong. But although this may be the case in a very few instances, our taste and habits readily acknowledge as complete and absolute a difference betwixt the epopeia and romance, as can exist betwixt two distinct species of the same generic class.

We have said of romance, that it first appears in the form of metrical history, professes to be a narrative of real facts, and is, indeed, nearly allied to such history as an early state of society affords; which is always exaggerated by the prejudices and partialities of the tribe to which it belongs, as well as deeply marked by their idolatry and superstition. These it becomes the trade of the romancers still more to exaggerate, until the thread of truth can scarce be discern ed in the web of fable which involves it; and we are compelled to renounce all hope of deriving serious or authentic information from the materials upon which the compounders of fiction have been so long at work, from one generation to another, that they have at length obliterated tile very shadow of reality or even probability.

The view we have given of the origin of romance will be [7:19:320]found to agree with the facts which the researches of so many active investigators of this curious subject have been able to ascertain. It is found, for example, and we will produce instances in viewing the progress of romance in particular countries, that the earliest productions of this sort, known to exist, are short narrations or ballads, which were probably sung on solemn or festive occasions, recording the deeds and praises of some famed champion of the tribe and country, or perhaps the history of some remarkable victory or signal defeat, calculated to interest the audience by the associations which the song awakens. These poems, of which very few can now be supposed to exist, are not without flashes of genius, but brief, rude, and often obscure, from real antiquity or affected sublimity of diction. The song on the battle of Brunanburgh, preserved in the Saxon Chronicle, is a genuine and curious example of this aboriginal style of poetry.

Even at this early period, ^[3. The religious romances of Barlaam and Jehosephat were composed by John of Damascus in the eighth century. ] there may be observed a distinction betwixt what may be called the Temporal and ⅛∣t- ritual romances; the first destined to the celebration of worldly glory; the second to recording the deaths of martyrs and the miracles of saints; both which themes unquestionably met with an almost equally favourable reception from their hearers. But although most nations possess, in their early species of literature, specimens of both kinds of romance, the proportion of each, as was naturally to have been expected, differs according as the genius of the people amongst whom they occur leaned towards devotion or military enterprise. Thus, of the Saxon specimens of poetry, which manuscripts still afford us, a very large proportion is devotional, amongst which are several examples of the spiritual romance, but very few, indeed, of those respecting warfare or chivalry. On the other hand, the Norman language, though rich in examples of both kinds of romances, is particularly abundant in that which relates to battle and warlike adventure. The Christian Saxons had become comparatively pacific, while the Normans were certainly accounted the most martial people in Europe.

However different the spiritual romance may be from the temporal in scope and tendency, the nature of the two compositions did not otherwise greatly differ. The structure of verse and style of composition was the same; and the induction, even when the most serious subject was undertaken, exactly resembled that with which minstrels introduced their idle tales, and often contained allusions to them. Warton quotes a poem on the Passions, which begins,
I hereth one lutele tale, that Ich eu wille telle,
As wi vyndeth hit invrite in the godspelle,
Nuz hit nouht of Carlemeyne ne of the Duzpere,
Ac of Criste’s thruurynge, &c.

The temporal romances, on the other hand, often commenced by such invocations of the Deity, as would only have been in place when a much more solemn subject was to be agitated. The exordium of the Romance of Ferumbras may serve as an example of a custom almost universal;
God in glorye of mightis moost
That all things made in sapience,
By virtue of Word and Holy Gooste,
Giving to men great excellence, &c.

The distresses and dangers which the knight endured for the sake of obtaining earthly fame and his mistress’s favour, the saint or martyr was exposed to for the purpose of securing his rank in heaven, and the favour of some beloved and peculiar patron saint. If the earthly champion is in peril from monsters, dragons, and enchantments, the spiritual hero is represented as liable to the constant assaults of the whole invisible world, headed by the ancient dragon himself. If the knight is succoured at need by some favouring fairy or protecting genius, the saint is under the protection not only of the whole heavenly host, but of same one divine patron or patroness who is his especial auxiliary. Lastly, the conclusion of the romance, which usually assigns to the champion a fair realm, an abundant succession, and a train of happy years, consigns to the martyr his fane and altar upon earth, and in heaven his seat among saints and angels, and his share in a blessed eternity. It remains but to say, that the style and language of these two classes do not greatly differ, and that the composers of both employ the same structure of rhythm and of language, and draw their ideas and their incidents from similar sources; so that, having noticed the existence of the spiritual romance, it is unnecessary for the present to prosecute this subject farther.

Another early and natural division of these works of fiction seems to have arranged them into Serious and Comical. The former were by far the most numerous, and examples of the latter are in most countries comparatively rare. Such a class, however, existed, as proper romances, even if we hold the comic romance distinct from the Contes and Fabliaux of the French, and from such jocular English narratives as the Wife Lapt in Moral’s Skin, The Friar and the Boy, and similar humorous tales; of which the reader will find many examples in Ritson’s Ancient English Poetry, and in other collections. The scene of these gestes being laid in low, or at least in ordinary life, they approach in their nature more nearly to the class of novels, and may perhaps be considered as the earliest specimens of that kind of composition. But the proper comic romance was that in which the high terms and knightly adventures of chivalry were burlesqued, by ascribing them to clowns or others of a low and mean degree. Such compositions formed, as it were, a parody on the serious romance, to which they bore the same proportion as the antimasque, studiously filled with grotesque, absurd, and extravagant characters, “entering,” as the stage direction usually informs us, “to a confused music,” bore to the masque itself, where all was dignified, noble, stately, and harmonious.

An excellent example of the comic romance is the Tournament of Tottenham, printed in Piercy’s Reliques, in which a number of clowns are introduced practising one of these warlike games, which were the exclusive prerogative of the warlike and noble. They are represented making vows to the swan, the peacock, and the ladies; riding a tilt on their clumsy cart horses,and encountering each other withplough-shares and flails; whilst their defensive armour consisted of great wooden bowls and troughs, by way of helmets and cuirasses. The learned editor seems to have thought this singular composition was like Don Quixote, with which he compares it, a premeditated effort of satire, written to expose the grave and fantastic manners of the serious romance. This is considering the matter too deeply, and ascribing to the author a more critical purpose than he was probably capable of conceiving. It is more natural to suppose that his only ambition was to raise a laugh, by ascribing to the vulgar the manners and exercises of the noble and valiant; as in the well-known farce of High Life Below Stairs, the ridicule is not directed against the manners described, but against the menials who affect those that are only befitting their superiors. The Hunting of the Hare, published in the collection formed by the late industrious and accurate Mr. Weber, is a comic romance of the same order. A yeoman informs the inhabitants of a country hamlet that he has found a hare sitting, and invites them to come to course her. They attend, accordingly, with all the curs and mastiffs of their village, and the unsportsman-like manner in which the inexperienced huntsmen and their irregular pack conduct themselves, forms the interest of the piece. It can hardly be supposed the satire is directed against the sport of hunt[7:19:321]ing itself; since the whole ridicule arises out of the want of ' the necessary knowledge of its rules, incident to the ignorance and inexperience of the clowns who undertook to practise an art peculiar to gentlemen. The ancient poetry of Scotland furnishes several examples of this ludicrous style of romantic composition; as the Tournament at the Drum, and the Justing of Watson and Barbour, by Sir David Lindsay. It is probable that these mock encounters were sometimes acted in earnest; at least King James I. is accused of witnessing such practical jests; “sometimes presenting David Droman and Archie Armstrong, the king’s fool, on the back of other fools, to tilt at one another till they fell together by the ears.”—(Sir Anthony Weldon’s Court of King James.)

In hastily noticing the various divisions of the romance, we have in some degree delayed our promised account of its rise and progress; an inquiry which we mean chiefly to confine to the romance of the middle ages. It is indeed true that this species of composition is common to almost all nations, and that even if we deem the Iliad and Odyssey compositions too dignified by the strain of poetry in which they are composed to bear the name of metrical romances; yet we have the pastoral romance of Daphnis and Chloe, and the historical romance of Theagenes and Chariclea, which are sufficiently accurate specimens of that style of composition. The Milesian fables and the romances of Antonius Diogenes, described by Photius, could they be recovered, would also be found to belong to the same class. It is impossible to avoid noticing that the Sybarites, whose luxurious habits seem to have been intellectual, as well as sensual, were peculiarly addicted to the perusal of the Milesian fables; from which we may conclude that they were not of that severe kind which inspired high thoughts and martial virtues. But there would be little advantage derived from extending our researches into the ages of classical antiquity respecting a class of compositions which, though they existed then, as in almost every stage of society, were neither so numerous nor of such high repute as to constitute any considerable portion of that literature.

Want of space also may entitle us to dismiss the consideration of the Oriental romances, unless in so far as in the course of the middle ages they came to furnish materials for enlarging and varying the character of the romances of knight-errantry. That they existed early, and were highly esteemed both among the Persians and Arabians, has never been disputed; and the most interesting light has been lately thrown on the subject by the publication οi' Antar, one of the most ancient, as well as most rational, if we may use the phrase, of the Oriental fictions. The Persian romance of the Sha-Namch is well known to Europeans by name, and by copious extracts; and the love-tale of Mejnoun and Leiluh is also familiar to our ears, if not to our recollections. Many of the fictions in the extraordinary collection of the Arabian Tales approach strictly to the character of romances of chivalry; although in general they must be allowed to exceed the more tame northern fictions in dauntless vivacity of invention, and in their more strong tendency to the marvellous. Several specimens of the comic romance are also to be found mingled with those which are serious; and we have the best and most positive authority that the recital of these seductive fictions is at this moment an amusement as fascinating and general among the people of the East, as the perusal of printed romances and novels among the European public. But a minute investigation into this particular species of romance would lead us from our present field, already sufficiently extensive for the limits to which our plan confines it.

The European Romance, wherever it arises, and in whatsoever country it begins to be cultivated, had its origin in some part of the real or fabulous history of that country; and of this we will produce, in the sequel, abundant proofs.

But the simple tale of tradition has not passed through many mouths, ere some one, to indulge his own propensity for the wonderful, or to secure by novelty the attention of his audience, augments the meagre chronicle with his own apocryphal inventions. Skirmishes are magnified into great battles; the champion of a remote age is exaggerated into a sort of demi-god; and the enemies whom he encountered and subdued are multiplied in number, and magnified in strength, in order to add dignity to his successes against them. Chaunted to rhythmical numbers, the songs which celebrate the early valour of the fathers of the tribe become its war-cry in battle, and men march to conflict hymning the praises and the deeds of some real or supposed precursor who had marshalled their fathers in the path of victory. No reader can have forgotten that when the decisive battle of Hastings commenced, a Norman minstrel, Taillefer, advanced on horseback before the invading host, and gave the signal for onset, by singing the Song of Roland, that renowned nephew of Charlemagne, of whom romance speaks so much, and history so little; and whose fall, with the chivalry of Charles the great in the pass of Roncesvalles, has given rise to such clouds of romantic fiction, that its very name has been for ever associated with it. The remarkable passage has been often quoted from the Brut of Wace, an Anglo-Norman metrical chronicle.
Taillefer, qui moult bien chantout Sur un cheval qui tost alout,
Devant le Duc alout chantant De Karlemaigne et de Reliant,
Et d’Oliver et des vassals,
Qui morurent en Rencevals.
Which may be thus rendered:
Taillefer, who sung both well and loud,
Came mounted on a courser proud;
Before the Duke the minstrel sprung.
And loud of Charles and Roland sung,
Of Oliver and champions mo,
Who died at fatal Ronçevaux.

This champion possessed the sleight-of-hand of the juggler, as well as the art of the minstrel. He tossed up his sword in the air, and caught it again as he gallopped to the charge, and showed other feats of dexterity. Taillefer slew two Saxon warriors of distinction, and was himself killed by a third. Ritson, with less than his usual severe accuracy, supposed that Taillefer sung some part of a long metrical romance upon Roland and his history; but the words chanson, cantilena, and song, by which the composition is usually described, seems rather to apply to a brief ballad or national song; which is also more consonant with our ideas of the time and place where it was chaunted.

But neither with these romantic and metrical chronicles did the mind long remain satisfied; more details were demanded, and were liberally added by the invention of those who undertook to cater for the public taste in such matters. The same names of kings and champions, which had first caught the national ear, were still retained, in order to secure attention, and the same assertions of authenticity, and of reference to real history, were stoutly made both in the commencement and in the course of the narrative. Each nation, as will presently be seen, came at length to adopt to itself a cycle of heroes like those of the Iliad; a sort of common property to all minstrels who chose to make use of them, under the condition always, that the general character ascribed to each individual hero was preserved with some degree of consistency. Thus, in the romances of The Round Table, Gawain is usually represented as courteous; Kay as rude and boastful; Mordred as treacherous; and Sir Launcelot as a true though a sinful lover, and in all other respects a model of chivalry. Amid the Paladins of Charlemagne, whose cycle may be considered as peculiarly the property of French in opposition to Anglo-Norman ro[7:19:322]mance, Gan, or Ganelon of Mayence, is always represented as a faithless traitor engaged in intrigues for the destruction of Christianity; Roland as brave, unsuspicious, devotedly loyal, and somewhat simple in his disposition; Renaud, or Rinaldo, is painted with all the properties of a borderer, valiant, alert, ingenious, rapacious and unscrupulous. The same conventional distinctions may be traced in the history of the Nibelung, a composition of Scandinavian origin, which has supplied matter for so many Teutonic adventurers. Meister Hildebrand, Etzel, Thcodorick, and the champion Hogan, as well as Chrimhelda and the females introduced, have the same individuality of character, which is ascribed, in Homer’s immortal writings, to the wise Ulysses, the brave but relentless Achilles, his more gentle friend Patroclus, Sarpedon, the favourite of the gods, and Hector, the protector of mankind. It was not permitted to the invention of a Greek poet to make Ajax a dwarf, or Teucer a giant, Thersites a hero, or Diomedes a coward; and it seems to have been under similar restrictions respecting consistency that the ancient romancers exercised their ingenuity upon the materials supplied them by their predecessors. But, in other respects, the whole store of romantic history and tradition was free to all as a joint stock in trade, on which each had a right to draw as suited his particular purposes. He was at liberty not only to select a hero out of known and established names which had been the theme of others, but to imagine a new personage of his own pure fancy, and combine him with the heroes of Arthur’s Table or Charlemagne’s Court, in the way which best suited his fancy. He was permitted to excite new wars against those bulwarks of Christendom, invade them with fresh and innumerable hosts of Saracens, reduce them to the last extremity, drive them front their thrones, and lead them into captivity, and again to relieve their persons, and restore their sovereignty, by events and agents totally unknown in their former story.

In the characters thus assigned to the individual personages of romantic fiction, it is possible there might be some slight foundation in remote tradition, as there were also probably some real grounds for the existence of such persons, and perhaps for a very few of the leading circumstances attributed to them. But these realities only exist as the few grains of wheat in the bushel of chaff, incapable of being winnowed out, or cleared from the mass of fiction with which each new romancer had in his turn overwhelmed them. So that romance, though certainly deriving its first original from the pure fount of history, is supplied, during the course of a very few generations, with so many tributes from the imagination, that at length the very name comes to be used to distinguish works of pure fiction.

When so popular a department of poetry has attained this decided character, it becomes time to inquire who were the composers of these numerous, lengthened, and once admired narratives which are called metrical romances, and from whence they drew their authority. Both these subjects of discussion have been the source of great controversy among antiquaries; a class of men who, be it said with their forgiveness, are apt to be both positive and polemical upon the very points which are least susceptible of proof, and which are least valuable if the truth could be ascertained; and which, therefore, we would gladly have seen handled with more diffidence, and better temper, in proportion to their uncertainty.

The late venerable Dr. Percy, Bishop of Dromore, led the way unwarily to this dire controversy, by ascribing the composition of our ancient heroic songs and metrical legends, in rather too liberal language, to the minstrels, that class of men by whom they were generally recited. This excellent person, to whose memory the lovers of our ancient lyre must always remain so deeply indebted, did not, on publishing his work nearly fifty years ago, see the rigid necessity of observing the utmost and most accurate precision either in his transcripts or his definitions. The study which he wished to introduce was a new one; it was his object to place it before the public in an engaging and interesting form; and, in consideration of his having obtained this important point, we ought to make every allowance not only for slight inaccuracies, but for some hasty conclusions, and even exaggerations, with which he was induced to garnish his labour of love. He defined the minstrels, to whose labours he chiefly ascribed the metrical compositions on which he desired to fix the attention of the public, as “an order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sung to the harp verses composed by themselves or others.” ^[4. Essay Ancient Minstrels in England Reliques. ] In a very learned and elegant essay upon the text thus announced, the reverend Prelate in a great measure supported the definition which he had laid down; although it may be thought that, in the first editions at least, he has been anxious to view the profession of the minstrels on their fairest and most brilliant side; and to assign to them a higher station in society than a general review of all the passages connected with them will permit us to give to a class of persons who either lived a vagrant life, dependent on the precarious taste of the public for a hard-earned maintenance, or, at best, were retained as a part of the menial retinue of some haughty baron, and in a great measure identified with his musical band.

The late acute, industrious, and ingenious Mr. Joseph Ritson. whose severe accuracy was connected with an unhappy eagerness and irritability of temper, took advantage of the exaggerations occasionally to be found in the Bishop’s Account of Ancient Minstrelsy, and assailed him with terms which may be termed any thing but courteous. Without finding an excuse either in the novelty of the studies in which Percy had led the way, or in the vivacity of imagination which he did not himself share, he proceeded to arraign each trivial inaccuracy as a gross fraud, and every deduction which he considered to be erroneous as a wilful untruth, fit to be stigmatised with the broadest appellation by which falsehood can be distinguished. Yet theςe is so little room for this extreme loss of temper, that, upon a recent perusal of both these ingenious essays, we were surprised to find that the reverend editor of the Reliques, and the accurate antiquary, have differed so very little as, in essential facts, they appear to have done. Quotations are, indeed, made by both with no sparing hand, and hot arguments; and, on one side at least, hard words are unsparingly employed; while, as is said to happen in theological polemics, the contest grows warmer in proportion as the ground concerning which it is carried on is narrower and more insignificant. Their systems, in reality,do not essentially differ.

Ritson is chiefly offended at the sweeping conclusion in which Percy states the minstrels as subsisting by the arts of poetry and music, and reciting to the harp verses composed by themselves and others. He shows very successfully that this definition is considerably too extensive, and that the term minstrel comprehended, of old, not merely those who recited to the harp or other instrument romances and ballads, but others who were distinguished by their skill in instrumental music only; and, moreover, that jugglers, sleight-of-hand performers, dancers, tumblers,and such like subordinate artists, who were introduced to help away the tedious hours in an ancient feudal castle, were also comprehended under the general term of minstrel. But although he distinctly proves that Percy’s definition applied only to one class of the persons termed minstrels, those, namely, who sung or recited verses, and in many cases of their own composition; the bishop’s position remains unassailable, in so far as relates to one general class, and these the most dis[7:19:323]tinguished during the middle ages. All minstrels did not use the harp, and recite or compose romantic poetry; but it cannot be denied that such was the occupation of the most eminent of the order. This Ritson has rather admitted than denied; and the number of quotations which his industry has brought together, rendered such an admission inevitable.

Indeed, the slightest acquaintance with ancient romances of the metrical class, shows us that they were composed for the express purpose of being recited, or, more properly, chaunted to some simple tune or cadence for the amusement of a large audience. Our ancestors, as they were circumscribed in knowledge, were also more limited in conversational powers than their enlightened descendants; and it seems probable, that in their public festivals, there was great advantage found in the presence of a minstrel who should recite some popular composition on their favourite subjects of love and war, to prevent those pauses of discourse which sometimes fall heavily on a company, even of the present accomplished age, and to supply an agreeable train of ideas to those guests who had few of their own. It is, therefore, almost constantly insinuated, that the romance was to be chaunted or recited to a large and festive society; and in some part or other of the piece, generally at the opening, there is a request of attention on the part of the performer; and hence, the perpetual “Lythe and listen lordings free,” which in those, or equivalent words, forms the introduction to so many romances. As, for example, in the old poem of Guy and Colbrand, the minstrel speaks of his own occupation:

When meat and drink is great plentye,

Then lords and ladyes still will be,

And sit and solace lythe;

Then it is time for ιnee to speake,

Of kern knights and kempes greate,

Such carping for to kytbe.

Chaucer, also, in his rhyme of Sir Thopas, assigns to the minstrels of his hero’s household the same duty of reciting romances of spiritual or secular heroes, for the good knight’s pastime while arming himself for battle:

" Do cum,” he sayd. “my minestrales,

And jestours for to tellen tales

Anon in min arming.

Of romaunces that ben reales,

Of popes and of cardinales,

And eke of love-longing.”

Not to multiply quotations, we will only add one of some importance, which must have escaped Ritson’s researches; for his editorial integrity was such, as rendered him incapable of suppressing evidence on either side of the question. In the old romance or legend of True Thomas and the Queen of Elfland, Thomas the Rhymer, himself a minstrel, is gifted by the Queen of the Faery with the faculties of music and song. The answer of Thomas is not only conclusive as to the minstrel’s custom of recitation, but shows that it was esteemed the highest branch of his profession, and superior as such to mere instrumental music:

“To harp and carp Thomas wheresoever ye gon,

Thomas take the these with the”-

“Harping,” he said, “ken I non,

For tong is chefe of Mynstralse.” ^[5. Jamieson’s Popular ΒaUads, vol. ii. p. 27. ]

We, therefore, arrive at the legitimate conclusion, that although, under the general term minstrels, were comprehended many who probably entertained the public only with instrumental performances, with ribald tales, with jugglery, or farcical representations, yet one class amongst them, and that a numerous one, made poetical recitation their chief, if not their exclusive occupation. The memory of these men was, in the general case, the depository of the pieces which they recited; and hence, although a number of their romances still survive, very many more have doubtless fallen into oblivion.

That the minstrels were also the authors of many of these poems, and that they altered and enlarged others, is a matter which can scarcely be doubted, when it is proved that they were the ordinary reciters of them. It was as natural tor a minstrel to become a poet or composer of romances, as for a player to be a dramatic author, or a musician a composer of music. Whatever individual among a class, whose trade it was to recite poetry, felt the least degree of poetical enthusiasm in a profession so peculiarly calculated to inspire it, must, from that very impulse, have become an original author, or translator at least; thus giving novelty to his recitations, and acquiring additional profit and fame. Bishop Percy, therefore, states the case fairly in the following passage: “It can hardly be expected that we should be able to produce regular and unbroken annals of the minstrel art and its professors, or have sufficient information, whether every minstrel or bard composed himself, or only repeated, the songs he chaunted. Some probably did the one and some the other; and it would have been wonderful indeed, if men, whose peculiar profession it was, and who devoted their time and talents to entertain their hearers with poetical compositions, were peculiarly deprived of all poetical genius themselves, and had been under a physical incapacity of composing those common popular rhymes, which were the usual subjects of their recitation.” ^[6. Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, ] While, however, we acquiesce in the proposition, that the minstrels composed many, perhaps the greater part of the metrical romances which they sung, it is evident they were frequently assisted in the task by others who, though not belonging to this profession, were prompted by leisure and inclination to enter upon the literary or poetical department as amateurs. These very often belonged to the clerical profession, amongst whom relaxation of discipline, abundance of spare time, and impatience of the routine of ceremonious duties, often led individuals into worse occupations than the listening to or composing metrical romances. It was in vain that both the poems and the minstrels who recited them were, by statute, debarred from entering the more rigid monasteries. Both found their way frequently to the refectory, and were made more welcome than brethren of their own profession; as we may learn from a memorable Gest, in which two poor travelling priests, who had been received into a monastery with acclamation, under the mistaken idea of their being minstrels, are turned out in disgrace, when it is discovered that they were indeed capable of furnishing spiritual instruction, but understood none of the entertaining arts with which the hospitality of their convent might have been repaid by itinerant bards.

Nay, besides a truant disposition to a forbidden task, many of the grave authors may have alleged, in their own defence, that the connexion between history and romance was not in their day entirely dissolved. Some eminent men exercised themselves in both kinds of composition; as, for example, Maitre Wace, canon of Caen, in Normandy, who, besides the metrical chronicle of Le Brut, containing

Another authority of ancient date, the Chronicle of Bertrand Guesclin, distinctly attributes the most renowned romances to the composition of the minstrels by whom they were sung. As the passage will be afterwards more fully quoted, we must here only say, that after enumerating Arthur, Launcelot, Godfrey, Roland, and other champions, he sums up his account of them as being the heroes

De quoi cils minestriers font les nobles romans.
[7:19:324]

the earliest history of England, and other historical legends, wrote, in 1155, the Roman de Chevalier de Lyon, probably the same translated under the title of Ywain and Gawain. Lambert li Cors, and Benoit de Saint-Maur, seem both to have been of the clerical order; and, perhaps, Chretien de Troyes, a most voluminous author of romance, was of the same profession. Indeed, the extreme length of many romances being much greater than any minstrel could undertake to sing at one or even many sittings, may induce us to refer them to men of a more sedentary occupation than those wandering poets. The religious romances were, in all probability, the works of such churchmen as might wish to reconcile an agreeable occupation with their religious profession. All which circumstances must be received as exceptions from the general proposition, that the romances in metre were the composition of the minstrels by whom they were recited or sung, though they must still leave Percy’s proposition to a certain extent unimpeached.

To explain the history of Romance, it is necessary to digress a little further concerning the condition of the minstrels by whom these compositions were often made, and, generally speaking, preserved and recited. And here, it must be confessed, that the venerable Prelate has, perhaps, suffered his love of antiquity, and his desire to ennoble the productions of the middle ages, a little to overcolour the importance and respectability of the minstrel tribe; although his opponent Ritson has, on the other hand, seized on all circumstances and inferences which could be adduced to prove the degradation of the minstrel character, without attending to the particulars by which these depreciating circumstances were qualified. In fact, neither of these excellent antiquaries has cast a general or philosophical glance on the necessary condition of a set of men who were by profession the instruments of the pleasure of others during a period of society such as was presented in the middle ages.

In a very early period of civilisation, ere the division of tribes had been generally adopted, and while each tribe may be yet considered as one great family, and the nation as an union of such independent tribes, the poetical art, so nearly allied to that of oratory or persuasion, is found to ascertain toits professors a very high rank. Poetsare then the historians and often the priests of the tribe. Their command of language, then in its infancy, excites not merely pleasure, but enthusiasm and admiration. When separated into a distinct class, as was the case with the Celtic bards, and, perhaps, with the skalds of Scandinavia, they rank high in the scale of society, and we not only find kings and nobles listening to them with admiration, but emulous of their art, and desirous to be enrolled among their numbers. Several of the most renowned northern kings and champions valued themselves as much upon their powers of poetry as on their martial exploits; and of the Welsh princes, the Irish kings, and the Highland chiefs of Scotland, very many practised the arts of poetry and music. Llwareh Hen was a prince of the Cymraig, Brian Boromhe, a harper and a musician, and without resorting to the questionable authenticity of Ossian, several instances of the same kind might be produced in the Highlands.

But, in process of time, when the classes of society come to assume their usual gradation with respect to each other, the rank of professional poets is uniformly found to sink gradually in the scale, along with that of all others whose trade it is to contribute mere amusement. The professional poet, like the player or the musician, becomes the companion and soother only of idle and convivial hours; his presence would be unbecoming on occasions of gravity and importance; and his art is accounted at best an amusing but useless luxury. Although the intellectual pleasure derived from poetry or from the exhibition of the drama be of a different and much higher class than that derived from the accordance of sounds, or from the exhibition of feats of dexterity, still it will be found that the opinions and often the laws of society, while individuals of these classes are cherished and held in the highest estimation, have degraded the professions themselves among its idle, dissolute, and useless appendages. Although it may be accounted ungrateful in mankind thus to reward the instruments of their highest enjoyments, yet some justification is usually to be drawn from the manners of the classes who were thus lowered in public opinion. It must be remembered, that, as professors of this joyous science, as it was called, the minstrels stood in direct opposition to the more severe part of the Catholics, and to the monks in particular, whose vows bound them to practise virtues of the ascetic order, and to look upon every thing as profane which w>as connected with mere worldly pleasure. The manners of the minstrels themselves gave but too much room for clerical censure. They were the usual assistants at scenes, not merely of conviviality, but of license; and as the companions and encouragers of revelling and excess, they became contemptible in the eyes, not only of the aged and the serious, but of the libertine himself, when his debauch palled on his recollection. The minstrels, no doubt, like their brethren of the stage, sought an apology in the corrupted taste and manners of their audience, with which they were obliged to comply, under the true but melancholy condition that

—they who live to please must please to live.

But this very necessity, rendered more degrading by their increasing numbers and decreasing reputation, only accelerated the total downfall of their order, and the general discredit and neglect into which they had fallen. The statute of the 39th of Queen Elizabeth, passed at the close of the sixteenth century, ranks those dishonoured sons of song among rogues and vagabonds, and appoints them to be punished as such; and the occupation, though a vestige of it was long retained in the habits of travelling ballad-singers and musicians, sunk into total neglect and contempt of this we shall have to speak hereafter; our business being at present with those romances, which, while still in the zenith of their reputation, were the means by which the minstrels, at least the better and higher class amongst them, recommended themselves to the favour of their noble patrons, and of the audiences whom they addressed.

It may be presumed, that, although the class of minstrels, like all who merely depend upon gratifying the public, carried in their very occupation the evils which first infected, and finally altogether depraved their reputation; yet, in the earlier ages, their duties were more honourably estimated, and some attempts were made to introduce into their motley body the character of a regular establishment, subjected to discipline and subordination. Several individuals, both of France and England, bore the title of king of minstrels, and were invested probably with some authority over the others. The serjeant of minstrels is also mentioned; and Edward IV. seems to have attempted to form a guild or exclusive corporation of minstrels. John of Gaunt, at an earlier period, established (between jest and earnest, perhaps) a court baron of minstrels, to be held at Tilbury. There is no reason, however, to suppose that the influence of their establishments went far in restraining the licence of a body of artists so unruly as well as numerous.

It is not, indeed, surprising that individuals, whose talents in the arts of music or of the stage rise to the highest order, should, in a special degree, attain the regard and affection of the powerful, acquire wealth, and rise to consideration; for, in such professions, very high prizes are assigned only to pre-eminent excellence; while ordinary or inferior practisers of the same art may be said to draw in the lottery something worse than a mere blank. Garrick, in [7:19:325]His chariot, and whose company was courted for his wit and talent, was, after all, by profession, the same with the unfortunate stroller, whom tile British laws condemn as a vagabond, and to whose dead body other countries refuse even the last rites of Christianity. In the same manner it is easy to suppose that, when in compliance with the taste of their age, monarchs entertained their domestic minstrels, ^[7. Berdic lΒegis Joculator), the jongleur or minstrel of William the Conqueror, had, as appears from the Domesday record, three vills and five caracates of land in Gloucestershire without rent. Henry I. had a minstrel called Galfrid, who received an annuity from the abbey of Hyde. ] those persons might be admitted to the most flattering intimacy with their royal masters; sleep within the royal chamber, ^[8. A minstrel of Edward I., during that prince’s expedition to the Holy Land, slept within his tent, and came to his assistance when an attempt was made to assassinate him. ] amass considerable fortunes, found hospitals, ^[9. The Priory and Hospital of Saint Bartholomew, in London, was founded in the reign of Henry L by Royer or Raher, a minstrel of that prince. ] and receive rewards singularly over-proportioned to the perquisites of the graver professions; ^[10. In 1441, the monks of Maxlock, near Coventry, paid a donation of four shillings to the minstrels of Lord Clinton for songs, harping, and other exhibitions, while, to a doctor who preached before the community in the same year, they assigned only sixpence. ] and even practise in company with their royal masters the pleasing arts of poetry and music, which all are so desirous of attaining; ^[11. The noted anecdote of Blondel and bis royal master, Richard Coeur de Lion, will occur to every reader. ] whilst, at the same time, those who ranked lower in the same profession were struggling with difficulty to gain a precarious subsistence, and incurring all the disgrace usually attached to a vagabond life and a dubious character. In the fine arts, particularly, excellence is demanded, and mere mediocrity is held contemptible; and, while the favour with which the former is loaded, sometimes seems disproportion-ed to the utility of the art itself, nothing can exceed the scorn poured out on those who expose themselves by undertaking arts which they are unable to practise with success. Self-conceit, however, love of an idle life, and a variety of combined motives, never fail to recruit the lower orders of such idle professions with individuals by whose performances, and often by their private characters, the art which they have rashly adopted can only be discredited without any corresponding advantage to themselves. It is not, therefore, surprising that, while such distinguished examples of the contrary appeared amongst individuals, the whole body of minstrels, with the romances which they composed and sung, should be reprobated by graver historians in such severe terms as often occur in the monkish chronicles of the day.

Respecting the style of their composition, Du Cange informs us, that the minstrels sometimes devoted their strains to flatter the great, and sing the praises of those princes by whom they were protected; while he owns, at the same time, that they often recommended to their hearers the path of virtue and nobleness, and pointed out the pursuits by which the heroes of romance had rendered themselves renowned in song. ^[12. Ministelh dicti praesertim scurrae, mimi, joculatores, quos etiamnum vulgo Menestreux Menestriers, ] He quotes from the romance of Bertrand Guesclin, the injunction on those who would rise to fame in arms to copy the valiant acts of the Paladins of Charles, and the Knights of the Round Table, narrated in romances; and it cannot be denied, that those high tales, in which the virtues of generosity, bravery, devotion to his mistress, and zeal for the Catholic religion, were carried to the greatest height of romantic perfection in the character of the hero, united with the scenes passing around them, were of the highest importance in affecting the character of the age. The fabulous knights of romance were so completely identified with those of real history, that graver historians quote the actions of the former in illustration of, and as a corollary to the real events which they narrate. ^[13. Barbour, the Scottish historian, censures a Highland chief, when, in commending the prowess of Bruce in battle, he likened him to the Celtic hero, Fin Mac Coul, and says, he might in more mannerly fashion bave compared him to Gaudifer, a champion celebrated in the romance of Alexander. ] The virtues recommended in romance were, however, only of that overstrained and extravagant cast which consisted with the spirit of chivalry. Great bodily strength, and perfection in all martial exercises, was the universal accomplishment inalienable from the character of the hero, and which each romancer had it in his power to confer. It was also easily in the composer’s power to devise dangers, and to free his hero from them by the exertion of valour equally extravagant. But it was more difficult to ftame a story which should illustrate tile manners as well as the feats of chivalry; or to devise the means of evincing that devotion to duty, and that disinterested desire to sacrifice all to faith and honour ;—that noble spirit of achievement which laboured for others more than itself—which form, perhaps, the fairest side of the system under which the noble youths of the middle ages were trained up. The sentiments of chivalry, as we have explained in our article on that subject, were founded on the most pure and honourable principles, but unfortunately carried into hyperbole and extravagance; until the religion of its professors approached to fanaticism, their valour to frensy, their ideas of honour to absurdity, their spirit of enterprise to extravagance, and their respect for the female sex to a sort of idolatry. All those extravagant feelings, which really existed in the society of the middle ages, were magnified and exaggerated by the writers and reciters of romance; and these given as resemblances of actual manners, became, in their turn, the glass by which the youth of the age dressed themselves; while the spirit of chivalry and of romance thus gradually threw light upon and enhanced each other.

The romances, therefore, exhibited the same system of manners which existed in the nobles of the age. The character of a true son of chivalry was raised to such a pitch modi scurrarum erat Principes, non suis duntaxat ludicris oblectare, sed et eorum aures variis avorum, adeoque ipsorum Principum laudibus, non sine assentatione, cum cantilenis et musicis instrumentis, demulcere.-Interdum etiam virorum insignium et heroum gesta, aut explicata et jucunda narratione commemorabant, aut suavi vocis inflectione, fidibusque decantabant, quo sic dominorum, caeterorumque qui his intererant ludicris, nobilium animos ad virtutem capessendam et summorum virorum imitationem accenderent: quod fuit olim apud Gallos Bardorum ministerium, ut auctor est Tacitus. Neque enim alios à Minislcllis, veterum Gallorum Bardos fuisse pluribus probat Henricus Valesius ad 15. Ammiani— Chroniam Bertrandi Guesclini:

Qui veut avoir renom des bons et des vaillans,

II doit aler souvent à la pluie et au champ,

Et estre en la bataille, ainsy que fu Rollans,

Les quatre fils Haimon et Charlon li plus grans,

Li Dus Lions dc Bourges, et Guion de Connans,

Perceval li Galois, Lancelot et Tristans,

Alexandres, Artus, Godefroy li sachans,

De quoy cils menestriers font les nobles Romans.
[7:19:326]

of ideal and impossible perfection, that those who emulated such renown were usually contented to stop far short of the mark. The most adventurous and unshaken valour, a mind capable of the highest flights of romantic generosity, a heart which was devoted to the will of some fair idol, on whom his deeds were to reflect glory, and whose love was to reward all his toils; these were attributes which all aspired to exhibit who sought to rank high in ,the annals of chivalry; and such were the virtues which the minstrels celebrated. But, like the temper of a tamed lion, the fierce and dissolute spirit of the age often shewed itself through the fair varnish of this artificial system of manners. The valour of the hero was often stained by acts of cruelty, or freaks of rash desperation; his courtesy and munificence became solemn foppery and wild profusion; his love to his lady often demanded and received a requital inconsistent with the honour of the object; and those who affected to found their attachment on the purest and most delicate metaphysical principles, carried on their actual intercourse with a license altogether inconsistent with their sublime pretensions. Such were the real manners of the middle ages, and we find them so depicted in these ancient legends.

So high was the national excitation in consequence of the romantic atmosphere in which they seemed to breathe, that the knights and squires of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries imitated the wildest and most extravagant emprises of the heroes of romance; and, like them, took on themselves the most extraordinary adventures to shew their own gallantry, and do most honour to the ladies of their hearts. The females of rank, erected into a species of goddesses in public, and often degraded as much below their proper dignity in more private intercourse, equalled in their extravagances the youth of the other sex. A singular picture is given by Knyghton of the damsels-errant who attended upon the solemn festivals of chivalry, in quest, it may reasonably be supposed, of such adventures as are very likely to be met with by such females as think proper to seek them. “These tournaments are attended by many ladies of the first rank and greatest beauty, but not always of the most untainted reputation. These ladies are dressed in party-coloured tunics, one-half of one colour and the other half of another; their lirripipes, or tippets, are very short; their caps remarkably little, and wrapt about their heads with cords; their girdles and pouches are ornamented with gold and silver; and they wear short swords, called daggers, before them, a little below their navels; they are mounted on the finest horses, with the richest furniture. Thus equipped, they ride from place to place in quest of tournaments, by which they dissipate their fortunes, and sometimes ruin their reputation.”—(Knyghton, quoted in Henry’s History, vol. viii. p. 402.)

The minstrels, or those who aided them in the composition of the romances, which it was their profession to recite, roused to rivalry by the unceasing demand for their compositions, endeavoured emulously to render them more attractive by subjects of new and varied interest, or by marvellous incidents which their predecessors were strangers to. Much labour has been bestowed, somewhat unprofitably, in endeavouring to ascertain the sources from which they drew the embellishments of their tales, when the hearers began to be tired of the unvaried recital of battle and tournament which had satisfied the simplicity of a former age. Percy has contended for the northern Sagas as the unquestionable origin of the romance of the middle ages. Warton conceived that the Oriental fables, borrowed by those minstrels who visited Spain, or who in great numbers attended the crusades, gave the principal distinctive colouring to those remarkable compositions; and a later system, patronised by later authors, has derived them, in a great measure, from the fragments of classical superstition, which continued to be preserved after the fall of the Roman empire. All those systems seem to be inaccurate, in so far as they have been adopted, exclusively of each other, and of the general proposition, that fables of a nature similar to the romances of chilvalry, modified according to manners and state of society, must necessarily be invented in every part of the world, for the same reason that grass grows upon the surface of the soil in every climate and in every country. “In reality,” says Mr. Southey, who has treated this subject with his usual ability, “mythological and romantic tales are current among all savages of whom we have any full account; for man has his intellectual as well as his bodily appetites, and these things are the food of his imagination and faith. They are found wherever there is language and discourse of reason; in other words, wherever there is man. And in similar stages of civilization, or states of society, the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance, notwithstanding the difference of time and scene.” ^[14. Preface to Southey’s edition of the Morte D'Arthur. Lond. 1817, 2 vols. 4to. ] l

To this it may be added, that the usual appearances and productions of nature offer to the fancy, in every part of the world, the same means of diversifying fictitious narrative by the introduction of prodigies. If in any romance we encounter the description of an elephant, we may reasonably conclude that a phenomenon, unknown in Europe, must have been borrowed from the east; but whosoever has seen a serpent and a bird, may easily aggravate the terrors of the former by conferring on a fictitious monster the wings of the latter; and whoever has seen or heard of a wolf, or lion, and an eagle, may, by a similar exertion of invention, imagine a griffin or hippogriff. It is imputing great poverty to the human imagination, to suppose that the speciosa miracula, which are found to exist in different parts of the world, must necessarily be derived from some common source; and perhaps we should not err more grossly in supposing that the various kinds of boats, skiffs, and rafts, upon which men have dared the ocean on so many various shores, have been all originally derived from the vessel of the Argonauts.

On the other hand, there are various romantic incidents and inventions of a nature so peculiar, that we may boldly, and at once, refer them to some particular and special origin. The tale of Flora and Blanchefleur, for example, could only be invented in the east, where the scene is laid, and the manners of which are observed with some accuracy. That of Orflο and Heurodis, on the contrary, is the classical history of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the Gothic machinery of the elves or fairies, substituted for the infernal regions. But notwithstanding these and many other instances in which the subjects or leading incidents of romance can be distinctly traced to British or Armorican traditions, to the tales and history of classic antiquity, to the wild fables and rich imagery of Arabia, or to those darker and sterner themes which were first treated of by the Skalds of the north, it would be assuming greatly too much upon such grounds to ascribe the derivation of romantic fiction, exclusively to any one of these sources. In fact, the foundation of these fables lies deep in human nature, and the superstructures have been imitated from various authorities by those who, living by the pleasure which their lays of chivalry afforded to their audience, were especially anxious to recommend them by novelty of every kind; and were undoubtedly highly gratified when the report of travellers, or pilgrims, or perhaps their own intercourse with minstrels of other nations, enabled them to vary their usual narrations with circumstances yet unheard in bower and hall. Romance, therefore, was like a compound metal, derived from various mines, and in the different specimens of which, one metal or other was alternately predominant; and viewed in this light, the ingenious theories of those learned antiquaries, who have [7:19:327]endeavoured to seek the origin of this style of fiction in one of these sources alone, to the exclusion of all others, seem as vain as that of travellers affecting to trace the proper head of the Nile to various different springs, all of which are owned to be accessary to form the full majesty of his current.

As the fashion of all things passes away, the metrical romances began gradually to decline in public estimation, pro-bablyon account of the depreciated character of the minstrels by whom they were recited. Tradition, says Ritson, is an alchemy, which converts gold into lead; and there is little doubt, that, in passing from mouth to mouth, and from age to age, the most approved metrical romances became gradually corrupted by the defect of memory of some reciters and the interpolations of others; since few comparatively can be supposed to have had recourse to the manuscripts in which some have been preserved. Neither were the reciters in the latter, as in the former times, supplied with new productions of interest and merit. The composition of the metrical romance was gradually abandoned to persons of an inferior class. The art of stringing together in loose verse a number of unconnected adventures, was too easy not to be practised by many who only succeeded to such a degree as was discreditable to the art, by shewing that mere mediocrity was sufficient to exercise it. And the licentious character, as well as the great number of those who, under the various names of glee-men, minstrels, and the like, traversed the country, and subsisted by this idle trade, brought themselves and their occupation into still greater contempt and disregard. With them, the long recitations formerly made at the tables of the great, were gradually banished into more vulgar society.

But though the form of those narratives underwent a change of fashion, the appetite for the fictions themselves continued as ardent as ever; and the prose romances which succeeded, and finally superseded those composed in verse, had a large and permanent share of popularity. This was, no doubt, in a great degree owing to the important invention of printing, which has so much contributed to alter the destinies of the world. The metrical romances, though in some instances sent to the press, were not very fit to be published in this form. The dull amplifications which passed well enough in the course of a half-heard recitation, became intolerable when subjected to the eye; and the public taste gradually growing more fastidious as the language became more copious, and the system of manners more complicated, graces of style and variety of sentiment were demanded instead of a naked and unadorned tale of wonders. The authors of the prose romance endeavoured, to the best of their skill, to satisfy this newly awakened and more refined taste. They used, indeed, the same sources of romantic history which had been resorted to by their metrical predecessors; and Arthur, Charlemagne, and all their chivalry, were as much celebrated in prose as ever they had been in poetic narrative. But the new candidates for public favour pretended to have recourse to sources of authentic information, to which their metrical predecessors had no access. They refer almost always to Latin, and sometimes to Greek originals, which certainly had no existence; and there is little doubt that the venerable names of the alleged authors are invented, as well as the supposed originals from which they are said to have translated their narratives. The following account of the discovery of La 1res elegante délicieux melliflue et tres plaisante Hystoire du tres noble Roy Perceforest (printed at Paris in 1528 by Galliot du Pré,) may serve to show that modern authors were not the first who invented the popular mode of introducing their works to the world as the contents of a newly discovered manuscript. In the abridgment to which we are limitted, we can give but a faint picture of the minuteness with which the author announces his pretended discovery, and which forms an admirable example of the lie with a circumstance.

In the year 1286, Count William of Hainault had, it is averred, crossed the seas in order to be present at the nuptials of Edward, and in the course of a tour through Britain, was hospitably entertained at an abbey situated on the banks of the Humber, and termed, it seems, Burtimer, because founded by a certain Burtimericus, a monarch of whom our annals are silent, but who had gained, in that place, a victory over the heathens of Germany. Here a cabinet, which was inclosed in a private recess, had been lately discovered within the massive walls of an ancient tower, and was found to contain a Grecian manuscript, along with a royal crown. The abbot had sent the latter to king Edward, and the Count of Hainault with difficulty obtained possession of the manuscript. He had it rendered from Greek into Latin by a monk of the abbey of Saint Lande-lain, and from that language it is said to have been translated into French by the author, who gives it to the world in honour of the blessed Virgin, and for the edification of nobleness and chivalry.

By such details, the authors of the prose romances endeavoured to obtain for their works a credit for authenticity which had been denied to the rhythmical legends. But in this particular they did great injustice to their contemned predecessors, whose reputations they murdered in order to rob them with impunity. Whatever fragments or shadowings of true history may yet remain hidden under the mass of accumulated fable, which had been heaped on them during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in the metrical romances; and according to the view of the subject which we have already given, the more the works approach in point of antiquity to the period where the story is laid, the more are we likely to find those historical traditions in something approaching to an authentic state. But those who wrote under the imaginary names of Rusticien de Puise, Robert de Borron, and the like, usually seized upon the subject of some old minstrel; and, recomposing the whole narrative after their own fashion, with additional characters and adventures, totally obliterated in that operation any shades which remained of the first, and probably authentic tradition, which was the original source of the elaborate fiction. Amplification was especially employed by the prose romancers, who, having once got hold of a subject, seem never to have parted with it until their power of invention was completely exllausted. The metrical romances, in some instances, indeed, ran to great length, but were much exceeded in that particular by the folios which were written on the same or similar topics by their prose successors. Probably the latter judiciously reflected that a book which addresses itself only to the eyes, may be laid aside when it becomes tiresome to the reader; whereas it may not , always have been so easy to stop the minstrel in the full career of his metrical declamation.

Who, then, the reader may be disposed to inquire, can have been the real authors of those prolix works, who, shrouding themselves under borrowed names, derived no renown from their labours, if successful, and who, certainly, in the infant state of the press, were not rewarded with any emolument? This question cannot, perhaps, be very satisfactorily answered; but we may reasonably suspect that the long hours of leisure which the cloister permitted to its votaries, were often passed away in this manner; and the conjecture is rendered more probable, when it is observed that matters are introduced into those works which have an especial connection with sacred history, and with the traditions of the Church. Thus, in the curious romance of Huon de Bourdeaux, a sort of second part is added to that delightful history, in which the hero visits the terrestrial paradise, encounters the first murderer Cain, in the peformance of his penance, wfith more matter to the same purpose, not likely to occur to the imagination of a layman; besides, that the laity of the period were in general too busy and too igno[7:19:328]rant to engage in ∏terary tasks of any kind. The mystical portion of the romance of the Round Table seems derived from the same source. It may also be mentioned, that the audacious, and sometimes blasphemous assertions, which claimed for these fictions the credit due even to the inspired writings themselves, were likely to originate amongst Roman Catholic churchmen, who were but too familiar with such forgeries for the purpose of authenticating the legends of their superstition. One almost incredible instance of this impious specious of imposture occurs in the history of the Saint Graal, which curious mixture of mysticism and chivalry is ascribed by the unfearing and unblushing writer to the second person of the Trinity.

Churchmen, however, were by no means the only authors of these legends, although the Sires Cleres, as they were sometimes termed, who were accounted the chronicles of the times in which they lived, were usually in orders; and although it appears that it was upon them that the commands of the soveregins whom they served often imposed the task of producing new romancesunderthe usual disguise of ancient chronicles translated from the learned languages, or otherwise collected from the ruins of antiquity. As education became improved, and knowledge began to be more generally diffused, individuals among the laity, and those of no mean rank, began to feel the necessity, as it may be called, of putting into a permanent form the “thick-coming fancies” which gleam along the imagination of men of genius. Sir Thomas Malony, who compiled the Morte D’Arthur from French originals, was a person of honour and worship; and Lord Berners, the excellent translator of Froissart, and author of a romance called The Chevalier de la Cygne, is an illustrious example that a nobleman of high estimation did not think his time misemployed on this species of composition. Some literary fame must therefore have attended these efforts; and perhaps less eminent authors might, in the latter ages, receive some pecuniary advantages. The translator of Perceforest, formerly mentioned, who appears to have been an Englishman or Fleming, in his address to the warlike and invincible nobility of France, holds the language of a professional author, who expected some advantage besides that of pleasing those whom he addressed; and who expresses proportional gratitude for the favourable reception of his former feeble attempts to please them. It is possible, therefore, that the publishers, these lions of literature, had begun already to admit the authors into some share of their earnings. Other printers, like the venerable Caxton, compiled themselves, or translated from other languages, the romances which they sent to the press; thus uniting in their own persons the three separate departments of author, printer, and publisher.

The prose romance did not, in the general conduct of the story, where digressions are heaped on digressions, without the least respect to the principal narrative, greatly differ from that of their metrical predecessors, being to the full as tedious and inartificial; nay, more so, in proportion as the new romances were longer than the old. In the transference from verse to prose, and the amplification which the scenes underwent in the process, many strong, forcible, and energetic touches of their original author have been weakened, or altogether lost; and the reader misses with regret someof the redeeming bursts of rude poetry which, in theme-trical romance, make amends for many hundred lines of bald and rude versification. But, on the other hand, the prose romances were written for a more advanced stage of society, and by authors whose language was much more copious, and who certainly belonged to a more educated class than the ancient minstrels. Men were no longer satisfied with hearing of hard battles and direful wounds; they demanded at the hand of those who professed to entertain them, some insight into nature, or at least into manners; some description of external scenery, and a greater regard to probability both in respect of the characters which are introduced, and the events which are narrated. These new demands the prose romances endeavoured to supply to the best of their power. There was some attention shewn to relieve their story, by the introduction of new characters, and to illustrate these personages by characteristic dialogue. The lovers conversed with each other in the terms of metaphysical gallantry, which were used in real life; and from being a mere rhapsody of warlike feats, the romance began to assume the nobler and more artificial form of a picture of manners. It is in the prose folios of Lancelot du Lac, Perceforest, and others, that antiquaries find recorded tile most exact accounts of fights, tournaments, feasts, and other magnificent displays of chivalric splendour; and as they descend into more minute description than the historians of the time thought worthy of their pains, they are a mine from which the painful student may extract much valuable information. This, however, is not the full extent of their merit. These ancient books, amid many pages of dull repetition and uninteresting dialogue, and notwithstanding the langour of an inartificial, protracted, and confused story, exhibit from time to time passages of deep interest, and situations of much novelty, as well as specimens of spirited and masculine writing. The general reader, who dreads the labour of winnowing out these valuable passages from the sterile chaff through which they are scattered, will receive an excellent idea of the beauties and defects of the romance from Tressan’s Corps <1Extraits de Romans de Chevalerie, from Mr. Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Romances, and Mr. Dunlop’s History of Fiction.

These works continued to furnish the amusement of the most polished courts in Europe, so long as the manners and habits of chivalry continued to animate them. Even the sagacious Catherine of Medicis considered the romance of Perceforest as the work best qualified to form the manners and amuse the leisure of a young prince; since she impressed on Charles IX. the necessity of studying it with attention. But by degrees the progress of new opinions in religion, the promulgation of a stricter code of morality, together with the important and animating discussions which began to be carried on by means of the press, diverted the public attention from these antiquated legends. The Protestants of England, and the Huguenots of France, were rigorous in their censure of books of chivalry, in proportion as they had been patronized formerly under the Catholic system; perhaps because they helped to arrest men’s thoughts from more serious subjects of occupation. The learned Ascham thus inveighs against the romance of Morte D’Arthur, and atthe same time acquaints us with its having passed out of fashion: “In our forefathers’ tyme, when papestrie, asastandyng poole, covered and overflowed all Englande, fewe bookes were read in our tongue, savyng certaine bookes of chivalrie,as they said for pastime and pleasure; which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks, or wanton chanons. As, for example, Lα Morte D’Arthur, the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two spcciall poyntes, in open manslaughter, and bold baw-drye: in which booke they are counted the noblest knightes thateokill most men without anyquarrell, and commit foulest adulteries by sutlest shiftes; as Sir Launce!ote, with the wife of King Arthur his master; Sir Tristram, with the wife of King Marke his uncle; Sir Lamerocke, with the wife of King Lote, that was his own aunt. This is good stuffe for wise men to laughe at, or honest men to take pleasure at: yet I know, when God’s Bible was banished the court, and La Morte D'Arthur received into the prince’s chamber.” ^[15. Works ]

The brave and religious La Noue is not more favourable to the perusal of romances than the learned Ascham; at[7:19:329]tributing to the public taste for these compositions the decay of morality amongst the French nobility. “The ancient fables whose relikes doe yet remain, namely, Lancelot of the Lahe, Pierceforest, Tristram, Giron the Courteous, and such others, doe beare witnesse of this olde vanitie; herewith were men fed for the space of 500 yeeres, untill our language growing more polished, and our mindes more ticklish, they were driven to invent some nouelties wherewith to delight us. Thus came y' bookes of Amadis into light among us in this last age. But to say y , truth, Spaine bred the, and France new clothed the in gay garments. In y* daies of Henrie the Second did they beare the chiefest sway, and I think if any man weuld then have reproved the, he should have been spit at because they were of themselves playfellowes and maintainers to a great sort of persons; whereof some, after they had learned to amize in speech, their teeth watered, so desirous were they even to taste of some small morsels of the delicacies therein most livelie and naturally represented.” ^[16. The Politicke and Militarie Discourses ] The gallant Maréchal proceeds at considerable length to refute the arguments of those who contended that these books were intended as a spur to the practice of arms and honourable exercises amongst youth, and labours hard to shew that they teach dishonest practices both in love and in arms. It is impossible to suppress a smile when we find such an author as La Noue denouncing the introduction of spells, witchcrafts, and enchantments into these volumes, not because such themes are absurd and nonsensical, but because the representing such beneficent enchanters as Alquife and Urganda is, in fact, a vindication of those who traffic with the powers of darkness; and that those who love to read about sorceries and enchantments become, by degrees, familiarized with those devilish mysteries, and may at length be induced to have recourse to them in good earnest.

The romances of chivalry did not, however, sink into disrepute under the stem rebuke of religious puritans or severe moralists, but became gradually neglected, as the customs of chivalry itself fell into disregard; when, of course, the books which breathed its spirit, and were written under its influence, ceased to produce any impression on the public mind, and, superseded by better models of composition, and overwhelmed with the ridicule of Cervantes, sunk by degrees into utter contempt and oblivion.

Other works of amusement, of the same general class, succeeded the proper romance of chivalry. Of these we shall take some notice hereafter, since we must here close our general view of the history of romance, and proceed briefly to give some account of those peculiar to the various European nations.

II. We can here but briefly touch upon a subject of great interest and curiosity, namely, the peculiar character and tone which the romance of chivalry received from the manners and early history of the nations amongst whom it is found to exist; and the corresponding question, in what degree each appears to have borrowed from other countries the themes of their own minstrels, or to have made use of materials common to the whole.

Scandinavia, as was to be expected, may be safely considered as the richest country in Europe, in ancient tales corresponding with the character of romance; sometimes composed entirely in poetry or rhythm, sometimes in prose, and much more frequently in a mixture of prose, narrative, and lyrical effusions. Their well-known Skaldls or bards held a high rank in their courts and councils. The character of a good poet was scarcely second to that of a gallant leader, and many of the most celebrated champions ambitiously endeavoured to unite both in their own persons. Their earlier sagas or tales approach to the credit of real history, and were unquestionably meant as such, though, as usual at an early period, debased by the intermixture of those speciosa miracula which the love of the wonderful early introduces into the annals of an infant country. There are, however, very many of the sagas, indeed by far the greater number of those now known to exist, which must be considered as falling rather under the class of fictitious than of real narratives; and which, therefore, belong to our present subject of inquiry. The Omeyinger Saga, the Heimskringla, the Saga of Olaf Triggvason, the Eyrbyg-gia Saga, and several others, may be considered as historical; whilst the numerous narratives referring to the history of the Nibelungen and Volsungen are as imaginary as the romances which treat of King Arthur and of Charlemagne. These singular compositions, short, abrupt, and concise in expression, full of bold and even extravagant metaphor, exhibiting many passages of forceful and rapid description, hold a character of their own; and whilst they remind us of the indomitable courage and patient endurance of the hardy Scandinavians, at once the honour and the terror of Europe, rise far above the tedious and creeping style which characterised the minstrel efforts of their successors, whether in France or England. In the pine forests also, and the frozen mountains of the north, there were nursed, amid the reliques of expiring paganism, many traditions of a character more wild and terrible than the fables of classical superstition; and these the gloomy imagination of the skalds tailed not to transfer to their romantic tales. The late spirit of inquiry which has been so widely spread through Germany, has already begun to throw much light on this neglected storehouse of romantic lore, which is worthy of much more attention than has yet been bestowed upon it in Britain. It must, however, be remarked, that although the north possesses champions and romances of its own, unknown to southern song, yet, in a later age, the inhabitants of these countries borrowed from the French minstrels some of their most popular subjects; and hence we find sagas on the subject of Sir Tristrem, Sir Percival, Sir Ywain, and others, the well-known themes of French and English romance. These, however, must necessarily be considered later in date, as well as far inferior in interest, to the sagas of genuine northern birth. Mr. Ritson has indeed quoted their existence as depreciating the pretensions of the northern nations to the possession of poems of high antiquity of their own native growth. Had he been acquainted with the Norman-Kiempe-Datur, a large folio, printed at Stockholm in 1737, he would have been satisfied, that out of the numerous collection of legends respecting the achievements of Gothic champions, far the greater part are of genuine Norse origin; and although having many features in common with the romances of southern chivalry, are, in other marked particulars, distinctly divided from that class of fictitious composition.

The country of Germany, lying contiguous to France, and constantly engaged in friendly and hostile intercourse with that great seat of romantic fiction, became, of course, an early partaker in the stores which it afforded. The Minnesingers of the Holy Empire were a race no less cherished than the Troubadours of Provence, or the Minstrels of Normandy; and no less active in availing themselves of their indigenous traditions, or importing those of other countries, in order to add to their stock of romantic fiction. Gotfrit of Strasburg composed many thousand lines upon the popular subject of Sir Tristrem; and others have been equally copious, both as translators and as original authors, upon various subjects connected with French romance; but Germany possessed materials, partly borrowed from Scandinavia, partly peculiar to her own traditional history, as well as to that of the Roman empire, which they applied to the construction of a cycle of heroes as famous [7:19:330]in Teutonic song as those of Arthur and of Charlemagne in France and Britain.

As in all other cases of the kind, a real conqueror, the fame of whose exploits survived in tradition, was adopted as the central object, around whom were to be assembled a set of champions, and with whose history was to be interwoven the various feats of courage which they performed, and the adventures which they underwent. Theodorick King of the Goths, called in these romantic legends Dide-rickof Bern (be. Verona,) was selected for this purpose by the German Minnesingers. Among the principal personages introduced are Ezzel, King of the Huns, who is no other than the celebrated Attila; and Gunter, King of Burgundy, who is identified with a Guntacher of history who really held that kingdom. The good knight Wolfram von Eschenbach seems to have been the first who assembled the scattered traditions and minstrel tales concerning these sovereigns into one large volume of German verse, entitled Heldenbuch, or the Book of Heroes. In this the author has availed himself of the unlimited licence of a romancer; and has connected with the history of Didcrick and his chivalry a number of detached legends which had certainly a separate and independent existence. Such is the tale of Sigurd the Horny, which has the appearance of having originally been a Norse saga. An analysis of this singular piece was published by Mr. Weber, in a work entitled Illustrations of Northern Antiquities from the earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances; and the subject has been fully illustrated by the publications of the learned Von der Hagen in Germany, and those of the Hon. William Herbert.

It is here only necessary to say, that Theodorick, like Charlemagne and Arthur, is considered in the romance as a monarch more celebrated for the valorous achievements of the brotherhood of chivalry whom he has drawn around him, than for his own, though neither deficient in strength nor courage. His principal followers have each their discriminatory and peculiar attributes. Meister Hildebrand, the Nestor of the band, is, like the Maugis of Charlemagne’s heroes, a magician as well as a champion. Hogan, or Hagan, begot betwixt a mortal and a sea-goblin, is the fierce Achilles of the confederation. It is the uniform custom of the romancers to conclude by a general and overwhelming catastrophe, which destroys the whole ring of chivalry whose feats they had commemorated. The ruin which Roncesvalles brought to the Paladins of Charlemagne, and the fatal battle of Camlan to the Knights of the Round Table, fell upon the warriors of Diderick through the revengeful treachery of Crimhilda, the wife of Ezzel; who, in revenge for the death of her first husband, and in her inordinate desire to possess the treasures of the Niflunga or Burgundians, brought destruction on all those celebrated champions. Mr. Weber observes that these German fictions differ from the romances of French chivalry, in the greater ferocity and less refinement of sentiment ascribed to the heroes; and also in their employing to a great extent the machinery of the Duergar, or dwarfs, a subterranean people to whom the Heldenbuch ascribes much strength and subtilty, as well as profound skill in the magic art, and who seem, to a certain extent, the predecessors of the European fairy.

Italy, so long the seat of classical learning, and where that learning was first revived, seems never to have strongly embraced the taste for the Gothic romance. They received, indeed, the forms and institutions of chivalry, but the Italians seem to have been in a considerable degree strangers to its spirit, and not to have become deeply enamoured of its literature. There is an old romance of chivalry proper to Italy, called Guerino the Wretched, but we doubt if even this be of indigenous growth. Indeed, when they did adopt from the French the fashionable tales of Charlemagne and his Paladins, these did not attract the attention of the classical Italians, until Boiardo, Bemi, Pulci, and, above all, the divine Ariosto, condescended to use them as the basis of their well-known romantic poems; and thus the fictitious narratives originally composed in metre, and afterwards rewritten in prose, were anew decorated with the honours of verse. The romantic poets of Italy did not even disdain to imitate the rambling, diffuse, and episodical style proper to the old romance; and Ariosto, in particular, although he torments the reader’s attention, by digressing from one adventure to another, delights us, upon frequent perusals, by the extreme ingenuity with which he gathers up the broken ends of his narrative, and finally weaves them all handsomely together in the same piece. But the merits and faults of romantic poetry form themselves the fruitful subject of a long essay. We here only notice the origin of those celebrated works, as a species of composition arising out of the old romance, though surpassing it in regularity, as well as in all the beauties of style and diction.

With Spain the idea of romance was particularly connected; and the associations which are formed upon perusing the immortal work of Cervantes, induce us for a long time to believe that the country of Don Quixote must be the very cradle of romantic fiction. Yet, if we speak of priority of date, Spain was amongst the last nations in Europe with whom romance became popular. It was not indeed possible that, among a people speaking so noble and poetical a language, engaged in constant wars, which called forth at once their courage and their genius, there should not exist many historical and romantic ballads descriptive of their rencounters with the Moors. But their native poets seem to have been too much engaged with the events of their own age, and of that which had just preceded it, to permit of their seeking subjects in the regions of pure fiction; and we have not heard of a Spanish metrical romance, unless the poems describing the adventures of the Cid should be supposed to have any affinity to that class of composition. The Penincula, however, though late in adopting the prevailing taste for romantic fiction, gave origin to one particular class, which was at least as popular as any which had preceded it. Amadis de Gaul, the production, it would seem, of Vasco de Lobeira, a Portuguese knight, who lived in the fourteenth century, gave a new turn to the tales of chivalry, and threw into the shade the French prose romances, which, until the appearance of this distinguished work, had been the most popular in Europe.

The author of Amadis, in order, perhaps, to facilitate the other changes which he introduced, and to avoid rushing against preconceived ideas of events or character, laid aside the worn-out features of Arthur and Charlemagne, and imagined to himself a new dynasty both of sovereigns and of heroes, to whom he ascribed a style of manners much more refined, and sentiments much more artificial, than had occurred to the authors of Perceval or Perceforest. Lobeira had also taste enough to perceive, that some unity of design would be a great improvement on the old romance, where one adventure is strung to another with little connection from the beginning to the end of the volume; which thus concluded, not because the plot was winded up, but because the author’s invention, or the printer’s patience, was exhausted. In the work of the Portuguese author, on the contrary, he proposes a certain end, to advance or retard which all the incidents of the work have direct reference. This is the marriage of Amadis with Oriana, against which a thousand difficulties are raised by rivals, giants, sorcerers, and all the race of evil powers unfavourable to chivalry; whilst these obstacles are removed by the valour of the hero, and constancy of the heroine, succoured on their part by those friendly sages, and blameless sorceresses, whose intervention gave so much alarm to the tender-conscienced De la Noue. Lobeira also displayed considerable attention to the pleasure which arises fπ m the contrast of character;
[7:19:331]

and to relieve that of Amadis, who is the very essence of chivalrous constancy, he has introduced Don Galaor, his brother, a gay libertine in love, whose adventures form a contrast with those of his more serious relative. Above all, the Amadis displays an attention to the style and conversation of the piece, which, although its effects are now exaggerated and ridiculous, was doubtless at the time considered as the pitch of elegance; and here were, for the first time, introduced those hyperbolical compliments, and that inflated and complicated structure of language, the sense of which walks as in a masquerade.

The Amadis at first consisted only of four books, and in that limited shape may be considered as a very well conducted story; but additions were speedily made which extended the number to twenty-four; containing the history of Amadis subsequent to his obtaining possession of Oriana, and down to his death, as also of his numerous descendants. The theme was not yet exhausted; for, as the ancient romancers, when they commenced a new work, chose for their hero some newly invented Paladin of Charlemagne, or knight of King Arthur, so did their successors adopt a new descendant of the family of Amadis, whose genealogy was thus multiplied to a prodigious degree. For an accountof Esplandian, Florimond of Greece, Palmerin of England, and the other romances of this class, the reader must be referred to the valuable labours of Mr. Southey, who has abridged both Amadis and Palmerin, with the most accurate attention to the style and manners of the original. The books of Amadis became so very popular, as to supersede the elder romances almost entirely, even at the court of France, where, according to La Noue, already quoted, they were introduced about the reign of Henry II. It was against the extravagance of these fictions in character and in style, that the satire of Cervantes was chiefly directed; and almost all the library of Don Quixote belongs to this class of romances, which, no doubt, his adventures contributed much to put out of fashion.

In every point of view, France must be considered as the country in which chivalry and romance flourished in the highest perfection; and the originals of almost all the early romances, whether in prose or in verse, whether relating to the history of Arthur or of Charlemagne, are to be found in the French language; and other countries possess only translations from thence. This will not be so surprising when it is recollected, that these earlier romances were written, not only for the use of the French, but of the English themselves, among whom French was the prevailing language during the reigns of the Anglo-Norman monarchs. Indeed, it has been ingeniously supposed, and not without much apparent probability, that the fame of Arthur was taken by the French minstrels for the foundation of their stories in honour of the English kings, who reigned over the supposed dominions of that British hero; while, on the other hand, the minstrels who repaired to the coast of France, celebrated the prow ess of Charlemagne and his twelve peers as a subject more gratifying to those who sat upon his throne. It is perhaps, some objection to this ingenious theory, that, as we have already seen, the battle of Hastings was opened by a minstrel, who sung the war-song of Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne; so that the Norman duke brought with him to England the tales that are supposed, at a much later date, to have been revived to soothe the national pride of the French minstrels.

How the French minstrels came originally by the traditional reliquesconcerning Arthurand Merlin, on which they wrought so long and so largely, must, we fear, always remain uncertain. From the Saxons we may conclude they had them not; for the Saxons were the very enemies against whom Arthur employed his good sword excalibar, that is to say, if there was such a man, or such a weapon. We know, indeed, that the British, like all the branches of the Celtic race, were much attached to poetry and music, which the numerous relics of ancient poetry in Wales, Ireland, and the Highlands of Scotland, sufficiently evince. Arthur, a name famous amongst them, with some traditions concerning the sage Merlin, may have floated either in Armorica, or among the half-British of the borders of Scotland, and of Cumberland; and thus preserved, may have reached the ear of the Norman minstrels, either in their newly conquered dominions, or through their neighbours of Brittany. A theme of this sort once discovered, and found acceptable to the popular ear, gave rise, of course, to a thousand imitations; and gradually drew around it a cloud of fiction which, embellished by such poetry as the minstrels could produce, arranged itself by degrees into a system of fabulous history, as the congregated vapours touched by the setting sun, assume the form of battlements and towers. We know that the history of Sir Tristrem, first versified by Thomas the Rhymer of Erceldoune, was derived from Welsh traditions, though told by a Saxon poet. In fact, it may be easily supposed, that the romancers of that early period were more eager to acquire popular subjects than delicately scrupulous of borrowing from their neighbours; and when the foundation-stone was once laid, each subsequent minstrel brought his contribution to the building. The idea of an association of knights assembled around one mighty sovereign, was so flattering to all the ruling princes of Europe, that almost all of them endeavoured to put themselves at the head of some similar institution, and the various orders of chivalry are to be traced to this origin. The historical foundation ofthishuge superstructure is almost imperceptible. Mr. Turner has shewn that the evidence rather inclines to prove the actual existence of King Arthur; and the names of Gawain, his nephew, and of Genuera, his faithful spouse, of Mordred, and Merlin, were preserved by Welsh tradition. To the same source may be referred the loves of Tristrem and Ysolde, which, although a separate story, has become, in the later romances, amalgamated with that of Arthur. But there can be little doubt that all beyond the bare names of the heroes owes its existence to the imagination of the romancers.

It might be thought that the romances referring to the feats of Charlemagne ought to contain more historical truth than those concerning Arthur; since the former relate to a well-known monarch and conqueror, the latter to a personage of a very doubtful and shadowy existence. But the romances concerning both are equally fabulous. Charles had, indeed, an officer named Roland, who was slain with other nobles in the field of Roncesvalles, fighting, not against the Saracens or Spaniards, but against the Gascons. This is the only point upon which the real history of Charlemagne coincides with that invented for him by romancers. Roland was prefect of Bretagne, and his memory was long preserved in the war-song which bore his name. A fabulous chronicler, calling himself Turpin, compiled, in or about the eleventh century, a romantic history of Charlemagne; but it may be doubted whether, in some instances, he has not availed himself of the fictions already devised by the early romancers, while to those who succeeded them his annals afforded matter for new figments. The personal character of Charlemagne has suffered considerably in the hands of the romantic authors, although they exaggerated his power and his victories. He is represented as fond of flattery, irritable in his temper, ungrateful for the services rendered him by his most worthy paladins, and a perpetual dupe to the treacherous artifices of Count Gam, or Ganelon, of Mayence; a renegade, to whom the romancers impute the defeat at Roncesvalles, and all the other misfortunes of the reign of Charles. This unfavourable view of the prince, although it may bear some features of royalty, neither resembles the real character of the conqueror of the Saxons and Lombards, nor can be easily reconciled with the [7:19:332]idea, that he was introduced to flatter the personal vanity 'of the princes of the Valois race, by a portrait of their great predecessor.

The circumstance that Roland was a lieutenant of Brittany, and the certainty that Marie borrowed from that country the incidents out of which she composed her lays, seems to fortify the theory, that the French minstrels obtained from that country much of their most valuable materials; and that, after all that has been said and supposed, the history of Arthur probably reached them through the same channel.

The Latin writers of the middle ages afforded the French romancers the themes of those metrical legends which they have composed on subjects of classical fame.

The honour of the prose romances of chivalry, exclusive always of the books of Amadis, belongs entirely to the French, and the curious volumes which are now the object of so much research amongst collectors, are almost universally printed at Paris.

England, so often conquered, yet fated to receive an accession of strength from each new subjugation, cannot boast much of ancient literature of any kind; and, in the department of which we treat, was totally inferior to France. The Saxons had, no doubt, romances (taking the word in its general acceptation); and Mr. Turner, to whose researches we are so much indebted, has given us the abridgment of one entitled Caedmon, in which the hero, whose adventures are told much after the manner of the ancient Norse Sagas, encounters, defeats, and finally slays an evil being called Grendel, who, except in his being subject to death, seems a creature of a supernatural description. But the literature of the Saxons was destroyed by the success of William the Conqueror, and the Norman knights and barons, among whom England was in a great measure divided, sought amusement, not in the lays of the vanquished, but in those composed in their own language. In this point of view, England, as a country, may lay claim to many of the French romances, which were written, indeed, in that language, but for the benefit of the court and nobles of England, by whom French was still spoken. When the two languages began to assimilate together, and to form the mixed dialect termed the Anglo-Norman, we have good authority for saying that it was easily applied to the purpose of romantic fiction, and recited in the presence of the nobility.

Robert de Brunne, who composed his History of England about this time, has this remarkable passage, which we give, along with the commentary of the editor of Sir Tristrem, as it is peculiarly illustrative of the subject we are inquiring into.

Als thai baf wryten and sayd,

Haf I allé in myn Inglis layd,

In symple speche as I couthe,

That is lightest in manne’s mouthe.

I mad noght for no disours,

Ne for no seggours, no harpours,

Bot for the luf of symple men,

That strange Inglis cannot ken;

For many it ere that strange Inglis,

In ryme wate never what it is;

And bot thai wist what it mente,

Ellis methought it were allé schente.

I made it not for to be praysed,

Bot at the lewed men were aysed.

If it were made in ryme couwee,

Or in strangere, or enterlacé,

That rede Inglis it ere inowe That couthe not haf coppled a kowe,

That cuther in cowee or in baston Sum suld haf ben fordon;

So that fele men that it berde Suld not witte howe that it ferde.

I see in song, in sedgeyng tale, Of Εrceldoun and of Kendale, Hon tham sayis as thai tham wroght, And in ther saying it semes noghi. That may thou here in Sir Tristrem, Over gestes it has the steem, Over all that is or was, If men it sayd as made Thomas. Bot I here it no man so say, That of some copple som is away.

So thare fayre saying here befome,

Is thare travayle nere forlome;

Thai sayd it for pride and nobleye,

That were not suylke as thei,

And allé that thai wild overwhere,

Allé that ilk wille now forfare.

Thai sayd it in so quainte Inglis,

That manyone wate not what it is.

Therfore heuyed wele the more In strange ryme to travayle sore,

And my wit was oure thynne,

So strange speche to travayle in;

And forsoth I couth noght So strange Inglis as thai wroght,

And men besoght me many a tyme To tume it bot in light ryme.

Thai seyd, if I in strange ryme it turn,

To here it raanyon suld skorue;

For in it ere names fulle selcouthe,

That ere not used now in mouthe.

And therfore, for the comonalte,

That blythely wild listen to me,

On light lange I it began,

For luf of the lewed man.

“This passage requires some commentary, as the sense has been generally mistaken. Robert de Brunne does not mean, as has been supposed, that the minstrels who repeated Thomas’s romance of Sir Tristrem, disguised the meaning by putting it into quainte Inglis; but, on the contrary, that Kendal and Thomas of Erceldoune did themselves use such quainte Inglis, that those who repeated the story were unable to understand it, or to make it intelligible to their hearers. Above all, he complains that, by writing an intricate and complicated stanza, as ‘ ryme cowee, strangere, or entrelacé,' it was difficult for the diseurs to recollect the poem; and of Sir Tristrem, in particular, he avers, that he never heard a perfect recital, because of some one ‘ coppld or stanza, a part was always omitted. Hence he argues at length, that he himself, writing not for the minstrel or harper, nor to acquire personal fame, but solely to instruct the ignorant in the history of their country, does well in chusing a simple structure of verse, which they can retain correctly on their memory, and a style which is popular and easily understood. Besides which, he hints at the ridicule he might draw on his poem, should he introduce the uncouth names of his personages into a courtly or refined strain of verse. They were

Great names, but hard in verse to stand.

While he arrogates praise to himself for his choice, he excuses Thomas of Erceldoune and Kendale for using a more ambitious and ornate kind of poetry. They wrote, he says, for pride (fame) and for nobles, not such as these my ignorant hearers.” ^[17. Sir Tristrem, Introduction, pp∙ 61-65. Edin. 1804. ]

If the editor of Sir Tristrem be correct in his commentary, there existed in the time of Robert de Brunne, minstrels or poets who composed English poetry to be recited in the presence of the great, and who, for that purpose, used a singularly difficult stanza, which was very apt to be mutilated in recitation. Sir Tristrem, even as it now exists, shows likewise that considerable art was resorted to in constructing the stanza, and has, from beginning to end, a concise, quaint, abstract turn of expression, more like the Saxon poetry, than the simple, bald, and diffuse details of the French minstrel. Besides Sir Tristrem, there remain, we [7:19:333]conceive, at least two other examples of “gestes written in quainte Inglis” composed, namely, according to fixed and complicated rules of verse, and with much attention to the language, though the effect produced is far from pleasing. They are both of Scottish origin, which may be explained, by recollecting, that in the Saxon provinces of Scotland, as well as at the court, Norman was never generally used; and therefore it is probable that the English language was more cultivated in that country at an early period, than in England itself, where, among the higher orders, it was for a long time superseded by that of the French conquerors. These romances, entitled Sir Gawain, and Sir Gologras, and Sir Ga-leran of Galloway, have all the appearance of being original compositions, and display considerable poetical effort. But the uncouth use of words dragged inforthe sakeof alliteration, and used in secondary and oblique meanings, renders them extremely harsh in construction, as well asobscure in meaning.

In England it would seem that the difficulties pointed out by De Brunne, early threw out of fashion this ornate kind of composition; and the English minstrels had no readier resource than translating from the French, who supplied their language at the same time with the phrases of chivalry which did not exist in English. These compositions presented many facilities to tile minstrel. He could, if possessed of the slightest invention, add to them at pleasure, and they might as easily be abridged when memory failed, or occasion required. Accordingly, translations from the French fill up the list of English romance. They are generally written in short lines rhyming together; though often, by way of variety, the third and sixth lines are made to rhyme together, and the poem is thus divided into stanzas of three couplets each. In almost all of these legends, reference is made to “the romance,” that is, some composition in the French language, as to the original authority. Nay, which is very singular, tales where the subjects appear to be of English growth, seem to have yet existed in French ere they were translated into the language of the country to which the heroes belonged. This seems to have been the case with Hornehild, with Guy of Warwick, with Revis of Hampton, all of which appear to belong originally to England; yet are their earliest histories found in the French language, or at least the vernacular versions refer to such for their authority. Even the romance of Richard, England’s own Coeur de Lion, has perpetual references to the French original from which it was translated. It must naturally be supposed that these translations were inferior to the originals; and whether it was owing to this cause, or that the composition of these rhymes was attended with too much facility, and so fell into the hands of very inferior composers, it is certain, and is proved by the highest authority, that of Chaucer himself, that even in his time these rhyming romances had fallen into great contempt. TheΛtwιe of Sir Thopas, which that poet introduces as a parody, undoubtedly, of the rhythmical romances of theage, is interrupted by mine host Harry Bailly, with the strongest and most energetic expressions of total and absolute contempt. But though the minstrels were censured by De Brunne, for lack of skill and memory, and the poems which they recited were branded as “drafty rhymings,” by the far more formidable censure of Chaucer, their acceptation with the public in general must have been favourable, since, besides many unpublished volumes, the two publications of Ritson and Weber bear evidence of their popularity. Some original compositions doubtless occur among so many translations, but they are not numeroes, and few have been preserved. The poem of Sir Eger and Sir Grerne, which seems of Scottish origin, has no French original; nor has any been discovered either of the Squire of Low Degree, Sir Eglarnour, Sir Plein-damour, or some others. But the French derivation of the two last names renders it probable that such may exist.

The minstrels and their compositions seem to have fallen into utter contempt about the time of Henry VIII. There is a piteous picture of their condition in the person of Richard Sheale, which it is impossible to read without compassion, if we consider that he was the preserver at least, if not the author of the celebrated heroic ballad of Chevy Chace, at which Sir Philip Sidney’s heart was wont to beat as at the sound of a trumpet. This luckless minstrel had been robbed on Dunsmore Heath, and, shame to tell, he was unable to persuade the public that a son of the Muses had ever been possessed of the sixty pounds which he averred he had lost on the occasion. The account he gives of the effect upon his spirits is melancholy, and yet ridiculous enough.
After my robbery my memory was so decayde,
That I colde neather syng, nor talke, my wytts wer so dismayde,
My audacitie was gone, and all my myrry tawk:
Ther ys sum heare have sene me as myrry as a hawke;
But nowe I am so trublyde with phansis in my mynde,
That 1 cannot play the myrry knave, accordyng to my kynd.
Yet to tak thought, I perseve, ys not the next waye
To bring me out of det, my creditors to paye·
I may well say that I hade but well hape,
For to lose about threscore pounde at a clape.
The losse of my mony did not greve me so sore,
But the talke of the pyple dyde greve me moch mor.
Sum sayde I was not robde, I was but a lyeng knave,
Yt was not possyble for a mynstrell so much mony to have.
In dede, to say the truthe, that ys ryght well knowene,
That I never had so mochc mony of myn owene,
But I had frendds in London, whos namys I can declare,
That at all tyms wold lende me cc.lds. worth of ware,
And sum agayn such frendship I founde,
That thei wold lend me in mony nyn or tene pownde.
The occasion why I cum in dete I shall make relacion,
My wyff in dede ys a sylk woman be her occupacion,
And lynen cloths most chefly was her greatyste trayd,
And at faris and merkytts she solde sale-ware that she made;
As shertts, smockys, partlytts, hede clothes, and other thinggs,
As sylk thredd, and eggyngs, skirrts, bandds, and strings.

From The Chant of Richard Sheale, British Bibliographer, No. xiii. p. 101.

Elsewhere, Sheale hints that he had trusted to his harp, and to the well known poverty attached to those who used that instrument, to bear him safe through Dunsmore Heath. At length the order of English minstrels was formally put down by the act 39th of Queen Elizabeth, classing them with sturdy beggars and vagabonds; in which disgraceful fellowship they only existed in the capacity of fiddlers, who accompanied their instrument with their voice. Such a character is introduced in the play of Monsieur Thomas, as the “poor fiddler who says his songs.” The metrical romances which they recited also fell into disrepute, though some of the more popular, sadly abridged and adulterated, continued to be published in chap, books, as they are called. About fifty or sixty years since, a person acquired the nickname of Rosewal and Lilian, from singing that romance about the streets of Edinburgh, which is probably the very last instance of the proper minstrel craft.

If the metrical romances of England can boast of few original compositions, they can show yet fewer examples of the prose romance. Sir Thomas Malory, indeed, compiled, from various French authorities, his celebrated Morte dArthur, indisputably the best prose romance the language can boast. There is also Arthur of Little Britain; and the Lord Berners compiled the romance of the Knight of the Swan. The books of Amadis were likewise translated into English; but it may be doubted whether the country in general ever took that deep interest in the perusal of these records of love and honour with which they were greeted in France. Their number was fewer; and the attention paid to them in a country where great political questions began to be agitated, was much less than when the feudal system still continued in its full vigour.

III. We should now say something on those various kinds [7:19:334]of romantic fictions which succeeded to the romance of chivalry. But we can only notice briefly works which have long slumbered in oblivion, and which certainly are not worthy to have their slumbers disturbed.

Even in the time of Cervantes, the pastoral romance, founded upon the Diana of George of Monte Mayor, was prevailing to such an extentas made it worthy of his satire. It was, indeed, a system still more remote from common sense and reality than that of chivalry itself. For the maxims of chivalry, high-strained and absurd as they are, did actually influence living beings, and even the fate of kingdoms. If Amadis de Gaul was a fiction, the Chevalier Bayard was a real person. But the existence of an Arcadia, a pastoral region, in which a certain fantastic sort of personages, desperately in love, and thinking of nothing else but their mistresses, played upon pipes, and wrote sonnets from morning to night, yet were supposed all the while to be tending their flocks, was too monstrously absurd to be long credited or tolerated.

A numerous, and once most popular class of fictions, was that entitled the heroic romance of the seventeenth century.

If the ancient romance of chivalry has a right to be called the parent of those select and beautiful fictions which the genius of the Italian poets has enriched with such peculiar charms, another of its direct descendants, the heroic romance of the seventeenth century, is, with few exceptions, the most dull and tedious species of composition that ever obtained temporary popularity. The old romance of Heliodorus, entitled Theagenes and Chariclea, supplied perhaps the earliest model of this style of composition; but it was from the romances of chivalry that it derives its most peculiar characteristics. A man of a fantastic imagination, Honoré d’Urfé, led the way in this style of composition. Being willing to record certain love intrigues of a complicated nature which had taken place in his own family, and among his friends, he imagined to himself a species of Arcadia on the banks of the Lignon, who live for love, and for love alone. There are two principal stories, said to represent the family history of D’Urfé and his brother, with about thirty episodes, in which the gallantries and intrigues of Henry IV.’s court are presented under borrowed names. Considered by itself, this is but an example of the pastoral romance; but it was so popular that three celebrated French authors, Gomberville, Calprenede, and Madame Scuderi, seized the pen, and composed in emulation many interminable folios of heroic romance. In these insipid performances, a conventional character, and a set of family manners and features, are ascribed to the heroes and heroines, although selected from distant ages, and various quarters of the world. The heroines are, without exception, models of beauty and perfection; and, so well persuaded of it themselves, that to approach them with the most humble declaration of love, was a crime sufficient to deserve the penalty of banishment from their presence; and it is well if the doom were softened to the audacious lover, by permission, or command to live, without which, absence and death were to be accounted synonymous. On the other hand, the heroes, whatever kingdoms they have to govern, or other earthly duties to perform, live through these folios for love alone; and the most extraordinary revolutions which can agitate the wwld, art* ascribed to the charms of a Mandana, or a Statira, acting upon the crazy understanding of their lovers. Nothing can be so uninteresting as the frigid extravagance with which these lovers express their passion; or, in their own phrase, nothing can be more freezing than their flames, more creeping than their flights of love. Yet the line of metaphysical gallantry which they exhibited, had its date, and a long one, both in France and England. In the latter country they continued to be read by our grandmothers during the Augustan age of English; and while Addison was amusing the world with his wit, and Pope by his poetry, the ladies were reading delta, Cleopatra, and the Grand Cyrus. The fashion did not decay till about the reign of George I.; and even more lately, Mrs. Lennox, patronized by Dr. Johnson, wrote a very good imitation of Cervantes, entitled The Female Quixote, which had those works for its basis. They are now totally forgotten.

(d. d.d.)

modern romance and novel.

We alluded in the commencement of this essay, to the division of fictitious narratives in prose, into two classes; the romance, in which the interest of the narrative turns chiefly on marvellous and uncommon incidents; and the novel, in which the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modem state of society.

The rise of this last department of fictitious composition in England, takes place about the commencement of the eighteenth century; and its coincidence with the decline of the drama is remarkable. The novel aspired, in fact, to perform for a reading and refined age, what the drama had done for a ruder and more excitable period; to embody the spirit of the times in pictures at once amusing and accurate, and in the form best calculated to awaken attention and interest in those to whom they are addressed. In the earlier periods of a national literature, while the poetical and imaginative spirit of the time takes the direction of the long prose romance, the task of painting manners, and satirizing follies, and displaying the comic oddities of character, is most efficiently performcd by the drama. Its strength, terseness, and brevity, with the aid of action and scenery, present the manners living as they rise, with abundance of force at least, and probably, for a time, with sufficient fidelity. But as society becomes more decorous, and peculiarities of manners less marked, the pictures exhibited by the stage are apt to become less true; for dramatic effect appears to demand something more stimulating than reality affords; and hence the drama, with a pardonable leaning to the principle of stage effect, often continues to reproduce the manners, vices, and humours of a preceding age, long after they have ceased to exist, merely because they are found better adapted to that broad and strongly-coloured delineation in which it chiefly deals. Thus, though the age of Van-burgh, Congreve, and Wycherley, was probably not a very moral age, and the tone even of its polite conversation, would probably appear somewhat questionable to modem ears, there seems to be no reason to believe that the universal profligacy of manners, and boundless licence of conversation which are exhibited in the comedies of these writers, really characterised the period at which they wrote. Their Wildairs, Sir John Brutes, Lady Touchwoods, and Mrs. Frails, are conventional reproductions of those wild gallants and demireps which figure in the licentious dramas of Dryden and Shadwell. They represented the manners and the morals of an age gone by; and the audiences who tolerated these indecencies for the sake of the wit by which they were occasionally redeemed, would have been revolted by their exaggeration and incorrectness, if they had looked upon them as exhibitions of society as it existed. The drama, then, had ceased to be the mirror in which the age could contemplate itself, and exhibited the license of a masque, or the extravagance of a caricature, much more than the sobriety of actual life, or the fidelity of a portrait. Besides, there are many lesser traits of character, many sentiments and feelings, which are not at all dramatic, and which had therefore been overlooked by writers for the stage, yet in themselves highly interesting and curious, and capable, when judiciously employed, of exercising a strong influence on the feelings. These become more prominent, and stand out in brighter relief, as the restraints of civilization gradu[7:19:335]ally throw into the background the wilder passions and more stormy impulses of our nature, until they acquire an importance which not only justifies, but renders their introduction into any fictitious narrative which represents the peculiarities of the time, necessary; and for this purpose, the calm and even march of the novel, and the detailed development both of sentiment and incident which it allows, is found to be admirably adapted. It is in the works of our novelists, therefore, rather than our dramatists, and in those passages in our essayists of Queen Anne’s time, in which they treat of past fashions, manners, whims, and humours, that we must look for the changes which society has undergone, and from which we must try to realize to ourselves the features which it exhibited at any particular period.

The novel, then, affords a wider field for accurate and complete delineation of passions and feelings than the drama, and certainly one more in harmony with the dispositions of a modern public. In powerful effects no doubt it cannot compete with the stage. The whole range of novel or romance contains nothing, for instance, which in its tremendous impression, can be compared with the explosion of passion in the third act of Othello; but, on the other hand, it has greatly the advantage in the impression of verisimilitude which it leaves behind, produced by the accumulation of many particulars and minute traits of character; in pleasing interchanges of action and repose; in the delineation of emotions, which the drama, speaking only to the eye and the ear, cannot lay before us; in the descriptions of external scenery, which, in the hand of a writer of genius, are far more effective, when presented in words to the imagination, than when counterfeited to the eye upon the stage, even by all the united resources of the scene-painter and the mechanist; and which, from the strong connection which exists between the state of our feelings and external influences, are found in the hands of a judicious novelist, to afford powerful materials for deepening the pervading tone of sentiment which he aims to produce; just as in painting relief and effect are obtained by the tone and character of the background against which the figures are opposed. Another advantage obtained by the substitution of narrative fiction for the drama, was, that a much wider licence was obtained in the conduct of the plot. A good plot is no doubt as essential to the novel as the drama; but the kind of plot which may be used with effect in each, and the manner in which the incidents are to be conducted, differ materially. A play in which every scene does not grow out of the preceding, and lead directly into the next, with a visible progress of plot, is in that respect faulty. On the contrary, in the novel and romance, as in real life, much is admissible which is episodical, which does not directly help forward nor produce the catastrophe, but merely tends to bring out some point of character in the personages represented, or to increase the air of verisimilitude in the main story, by the appearance of minute and literal correctness in the details. In the novel or romance, too, it has been generally remarked that the catastrophe maybe made to turn upon accident, but that this is inadmissible in the drama. ^[18. See some vuluable papers on Art in Fiction, ascribed, we believe with justice, to Sir L. Bulwer. Monthly Chronicle, Kos. i and ii. ] Thus the catastrophe in the Bride of Lammermoor, where Ravenswood is swallowed up by a quicksand, is singularly grand in romance, but would be inadmissible in a drama. And on the same principle, Schiller has, in his Fiesco, thought himself compelled to deviate from the actual truth of history, and to ascribe the Count’s death, not to an accidental stumble from a plank, but to the hand of the republican Verrina. In a novel, the real catastrophe would have been far more impressive in its moral effect than the imaginary one; but Schiller held, and we think rightly, that in the drama nothing must be accident, but every thing result.

Although, as compared with the romance, the term novel may be said to indicate a class of fictions dealing more with calm feelings, and with manners and humours, than with strong passions, and deriving its interest more from the probability than the marvellous nature of its incidents, this definition is not to be taken too literally; for there are many works which we might call novels, in as much as the scene is laid in modern times, and the general course of the incidents is that of every-day life, but in which the even tenor of the story is occasionally broken by scenes of powerful passion, or incidents of a mysterious and terrible character, elevating the composition for the time into the sphere of the romantic; so that perhaps the word tale, as a middle term between the others, would most appropriately describe them. It has been doubted whether, although such a union of the common-place with the extraordinary, be not unfre-quently met with in the course of real life, a more cautious separation of these elements would not, on the whole, be most favourable to the effect of a narrative as a work of art; and whether the attempt to blend them, does not produce in fiction, something of that illegitimate effect which is the result of the melo-drama on the stage. It is certain, however, that the tendency for some time past, and particularly since the school of fiction introduced by Sir Walter Scott, has been towards a mixture of the novel and romance in the same composition, so that broad comedy is often found alternating with the pathetic, the gaiety of a ball-room with midnight murders upon lonely heaths, and the disclosure of some piece of fashionable scandal standing side by side with the discovery of some secret and fearful crime. In the hands of our great masters of fiction, we admit the fine effect which these occasionally produce. Judiciously arranged, these opposites are the light and shadow of the composition; but even in our greatest modern novelist, we could point out not a few instances in which this sort of contrast is carried too far; while in many of his imitators, it is so regularly and mechanically introduced, that, as in the case of Mr. Puff’s stage arrangements, we can always predict that the discharge of cannon wilt be followed by soft music.

When the declining popularity of the pastoral and heroic romance of the seventeenth century, suggested the necessity of opening a new vein in fiction, it is probable that the stilted, unnatural, and exaggerated character of those effete compositions led the public taste, by a natural recoil of feeling, into the opposite extreme, viz. the selection of topics and characters from common, and even from vulgar life, and a literal adherence to nature, even at the risk of the sacrifice of art. For we pass over the tiresome and licentious love stories of Mrs. Aphra Behn, with the just remark of Sir Richard Steele, that the lady appears to have “understood the practical part of love better than the speculative,” as well as those of her imitator, Mrs. Heywood, in which the struggle between the high sentimental character of the heroic romance, and the growing taste for a style of portraiture more true to the life, is very obvious, and come at once to the writer by whom the inspiration of reality was carried to its greatest perfection.

Defoe, (1661—1731) without high imagination, with no power of raising the passions, with little pathos and no eloquence, had yet that peculiar genius which enabled him to excel within the peculiar department which he chose for himself; that of counterfeiting homely truth by fiction, and forging, as it were, the handwrting of nature herself, with a dexterity which defied detection. Whether Defoe was led to the selection of his peculiar themes, by a real sympathy with roguery, (and his conduct in regard to the well-known imposture of Mrs. Veal’s Ghost would justify us in believing him to be like Gil Blas, “tant soi peu fripon ;”) or by the influence of the Spanish romances of roguery, such as Lazaro de Tormes, Marcos de Obregon,
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and Gusman d’Alfarache, with some of which it is highly probable that he was acquainted through translations; or whether his strong vulgar likenesses of seafaring personages, half privateer, half mariner, and his fondness for the delineation of equivocal characters of all kinds, arose from his familiarity with the one class, through his residence at Lime-house, and his acquaintance with Dampier,—and with the other, from his long and frequent imprisonments;—it is certain that though he had no intention of favouring immorality, he yet enters upon the delineation of personages, and scenes of roguery, low profligacy and vice, with a degree of curiosity and complacency, and dwells upon them with a fondness and minuteness of detail, altogether uncommon, and not a little unaccountable in a person who in his opinions savoured of the puritan. This strange labour of love, and study of the morbid anatomy of society, has resulted in a series of night pieces from the haunts of crime, which, though sombre and gloomy in a high degree, and little suited to a cultivated taste, nay, indeed, frequently producing on the mind the painful effect of a real chapter from the Newgate Calendar, yet display the most wonderful invention and keeping in all their parts, and a coherence and dexterity of adaptation to each other, which render the ordinary tests by which we endeavour to discriminate a fictitious from a real narrative, inadequate or altogether inapplicable to these singular compositions of Defoe. Whatever might be the motive of his humility of choice, Defoe, like many of his favourite heroes, was perfectly contented to take up his abode in the back settlements of fiction, and was most at home in that Alsatia of Romance, the purlieus of which, by common consent, his more ambitious predecessors had sedulously avoided, as discreditable or dangerous. The transition from their refined Orondates’ and Statiras , , to the society of the Captain Jack and Moll Flanders of Defoe, is, to use a phrase of Sterne, like turning from Alexander the Great to Alexander the coppersmith. In his novels, we rarely meet with any thing more exalted or respectable, than masters of trading vessels, dealers in small wares, supercargoes, or, it may be, pickpockets, pirates, candidates for the plantations, or emeriti who have already obtained that distinction. In the foreground, we have the cabin, the night cellar, the haunts of fraud, or the round-house; in the distance, Newgate, or Execution Dock. There can be but one opinion, however, as to the wonderful air of veracity, resembling that of a deposition upon oath, which Defoe has imparted to his fictitious creations, and which his genius effects, mainly by accumulation of details, non vi sed soepe cadendo; often even by the introduction of a multitude of irrelevant particulars and repetitions, just as in the conversation of uneducated persons in real life. Accordingly the result, as a simulacrum of reality, is one of magical deception. Lord Chatham, it is well known, took his Memoirs of a Cavalier for a real history; Dr, Mead believed his Journal of the Plague to be the work of a medical man, and his impudent but most plausible history of the apparition of Mrs. Veal, being received by many sober-minded persons as an actual apocalypse from the spiritual world, was the means, as is well known, of disposing of an unsaleable edition of Drelincourt upon death.

But notwithstanding this peculiar power of stamping the impression of reality upon the coinage of his imagination, which, to say the truth, was seldom of the finest metals, it may be safely affirmed, that but for his Robinson Crusoe, Defoe would scarcely now be remembered as a writer of fiction. The charm of that work, the first part of which appeared in 1719, is, that it emancipates us from those low haunts and questionable society with which his other novels make us acquainted. We escape from the fumes of tobacco and strong waters, to breathe a purer air on that lone island placed far amidst the melancholy main, where he has imprisoned his shipwrecked mariner; and whil e Defoe’s unrivalled power of inventing a series of probable minutiae, both in the way of reflexion and incident, enables him to conduct with consummate skill, what we may call the self-education of Crusoe in his solitude,—the process by which he adapts himself to his situation, and the gradual triumphs which, by his ingenuity and patience, he obtains over the difficulties and privations by which he is surrounded, till he changes desolation into comfort ;—the imagination of the writer is visibly raised beyond its usual grovelling level by the romance of the situation which he describes. His genius imbibes the spirit of the place; it imparts to the cave of the sailor, something of the seclusion and purity of a hermitage; till the simple train of reflections which he puts into the mouth of his uneducated mariner, upon the sublimity and awfulness of solitude, impress the mind more than the most eloquent declamation. It is a fine proof how completely Defoe has succeeded in interesting us for the solitary being to whom he has given a poetical life, and attuned the mind of his readers to that sentiment of silence and unbroken repose which is breathed over the scene of his imprisonment,—“where all the air a solemn stillness holds,”—that after a time the least incident which threatens to disturb the security of the cave, or the solitude of the island, assumes importance in our eyes, and the groan of an old goat expiring in a cave, or the print of a man’s foot in the sand, awaken a feeling of suspense and anxiety which many a writer has in vain laboured to excite by a prodigal expenditure of the machinery of terror.

That Robinson Crusoe may be considered in a great measure as a fortunate accident, and that its main charm arises from the more poetical and refined character which the nature of the story and its locality almost necessarily impressed upon it, is indeed evident from the visible inferiority of the second part, where the seclusion of the scene is broken in upon, and Defoe peoples the island with his usual retinue of planters and ship’s captains; a production which scarcely rises above the level of his Captain Singleton.

The application of the sameprincipleoforoducingeffect by minuteness of detail rather than by grasp, or the selection of a few marking traits, is visible in our next great novelist, Richardson (1689-1761,) but the principle is applied in a different and higher way. Defoe was satisfied with weaving chains of probable incidents, which might be fitted to any character, or at least any character of a given class, such as a mariner or a merchant, a planter or a pickpocket. He did not care, at all events he did not labour, to individualize character. Crusoe, his most finished portrait, is still only the average representative of all shipwrecked mariners; his reflections and his struggles, embody the hopes, fears, and efforts, of all men left to maintain a solitary warfare with difficulties. So bis Captain Jack, born a gentleman and bred a pickpocket, has nothing to separate him from other enfans perdus of the same class. But Richardson aspired to the creation rather of probable character than probable incident; and to this he applied the same system of accumulating minute traits of words, thoughts, and actions, and reiterating small touches, and minute lights and shadings, which Defoe had done to the creation of masses of coherent and plausible events. In the latter department, indeed, he is probably neither remarkable for success nor failure. Occasionally, and particularly in his Sir Charles Grandison, he outrages both patience and probability in no inconsiderable degree; and so little progress does the narrative make, that as Johnson remarked to Erskine, “Were you to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would he so fretted, you would go hang yourself.” But even in the most successful portion of his plots, there is no chance of our mistaking fiction for fact; the artist does not disappear behind his creations as in the case of Defoe. The very form, too, in which his novels are cast, that of a series of correspondence, however favourable to the display of traits of character, and minute dissection of sentiment, is [7:19:337]almost in itself fatal to the vraisemblance of incident. The affairs of private life we cannot help recollecting, are seldom managed to any great extent through the post-office, while in many cases it remains a mystery how such matters came to be committed to paper at all, and least of all under the circumstances in which they are supposed to be recorded by these persevering, and, in the existing state of the revenue laws, formidable correspondents.

There is in the mind of Richardson a very remarkable union of feminine tastes with masculine vigour. Early accustomed peculiarly to court the society of females; the depository of their gossip, the confident of their love secrets, the complete letter-writer of a little knot of young ladies when only thirteen years of age, the deference which he thus acquired for their tastes, and the insight he obtained into their habits of thinking, though probably springing, as Johnson believed, very much from his own vanity and love of praise, appear to have been of the utmost use to him in his novels, in which so much of the interest rests upon the female characters, and in the minute dissection and study of emotions and sentiments in which women are either the chief actors or sufferers. The traces of this influence appear constantly, and sometimes in excess, in the minute accuracy with which he dwells, in description, upon those little particulars of looks, and voice, and gesture, and turns of speech, which men in their correspondence generally overlook, but which women note with such care, and interpret with such sagacity; in the complacency with which he dwells on the details of robes and wedding dresses, which are conceived in the spirit of a waiting-w oman, and executed with the learning of a man-milliner; and which, as in the minute description given by Lovelace of Clarissas’ dress at the time of her elopement, are occasionally introduced in the worst place.

The more favourable results of these tastes are exhibited in the wonderful familiarity he evinces with the feelings and sympathies of women; for though,in his notions of perfection, either in manners or morals, we of another age often see cause to depart from Richardson’s standard, we may trust implicitly to his accuracy, when he is delineating the movements of passion in the female breast, the revolutions of feeling, or the struggle between feeling and delicacy. In his female portraits even more than in his corresponding delineations of male character, we acknowledge the justice of the remark which Sir Walter Scott applies to his portraits generally, that “in his survey of the heart, he left neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him, until he had traced its soundings, and laid it down in his chart with all its minute sinuosities, its depths, and its shallows.” This accuracy, indeed, constitutes at once his strength and his weakness; for not content with having surveyed the coast and taken its bearings, he still, from the very pride of discovery, insists on following the windings of the shore, and pointing out its landmarks, when those on board would have gladly seen him make his passage by the shortest course. It was the misfortune of Richardson, that, like nervous men in company, or like painters who go on retouching till the picture becomes loaded, he never knew when to have done, either with a character or a conversation. He was unskilful, as D’Israeli remarks, in the art of writing, and “could never lay his pen down while his inkhorn supplied it.” Even as regards the description of sentiment, or the creation of characteristic dialogue, the field in which Richardson was most at home, it is certain that he carried his system, probably as much from this inability to leave off, as from choice, to extremes, particularly in his last novel, Sir C. Grandison; and unless the reader selects that work on the system of the old lady mentioned by Sir Walter Scott, who chose it because she could sleep for half an hour at any time during its perusal, and still find the personages just where she left them, conversing in the cedar parlour, he will probably think there is more justice than D’Israeli seems willing to admit in the cold remark of D’Alembert, “La nature est bonne a imiter, mais non pas jusqu' a l’ennui."

It is not often that with this feminine character of intellect, a masculine vigour in painting scenes of a passionate and terrible cast is found united, and yet Richardson has proved his mastery over the higher passions, not less than his minute study of sentiment and manners, in the conclusion of Clarissa Harlowe. To apply to him the epithet of the Shakspeare of prose fiction, winch has been done by D’Israeli, is extravagant. A solitary creation of this kind, highly pathetic and morally impressive as it is, is but a narrow basis on which to rest the claims of the novelist to such a title. But the conception of the noble character of Clarissa Harlowe, set off by such a foil as is afforded by that of Lovelace, perhaps the most finished picture of the self-possessed and insinuating libertine ever drawn, (and certainly as great an improvement on that of the Lothario from which it was drawn, as Rowes’ hero had been on the vulgar rake of Massinger,) and the closing scenes of that novel, are at all events sufficient to place Richardson among the great writers of fiction; among the few who have formed a striking and original conception, which they have wrought out with a corresponding felicity and power. It is not the common-place idea of a woman of virtue foiling the schemes of a seducer, which Richardson has undertaken to illustrate: in the case of a lady like Clarissa, of birth, education, and good feelings, Mrs. Barbauld says truly, that would have been no triumph worthy of being recorded by such a pen; but it is the dignity, the deep interest, he has lent to the character, even in that situation of personal dishonour, with which, from whatever cause it has arisen, we are apt to connect the idea of degradation. “There is something,” says Mrs. Barbauld, ^[19. Richardson’s Life and Correspondence, vol. i, Introduction. ] “in virgin purity, to which the imagination willingly pays homage. In all ages something saintly has been attached to the idea of unblemished chastity, but it was reserved for Richardson to overcome all circumstances of dishonour and disgrace, and to throw a splendour round the violated virgin more radiant than she possessed in her first bloom. He has drawn the triumph of mental chastity; he has drawn it uncontaminated, untarnished, and incapable of mingling with pollution.”

The other novels of Richardson, Pamela, and Sir Charles Grandison, are of an inferior order to Clarissa. Pamela, his first work, besides the questionable character of some of its highly coloured scenes, the license of which leads one to smile at the notions of morality entertained by that literary oracle who declared, “that if all other books were to be burned, Pamela and the Bible should be preserved,” is justly liable to the objections pointed out by Mrs. Barbauld, that the heroine throughout her probation seems guided as much by worldly wisdom as by the love of virtue; that she acts like one who knows her price, and that her purity is protected more by the chance of securing a rich husband, and the prospect of “the gilded coach and dappled Flanders mares,” which she sees in perspective, than by any idea that virtue is its own reward.

Least of all, is it possible to relish Sir Charles Grandison, a work written upon an entirely wrong plan; a system of pedantic morality put in action in the person of a formal, bowing, moralizing hero, “content to dwell in decencies for ever;” a hero whose worst trial, as Sir Walter Scott observes, is the embarrassment of choosing between two females, both handsome, accomplished, and in love with him; a gentleman who detests the theory of duelling on Christian principles, but reconciles the practice of it to his conscience, because his skill in swordsmanship always en[7:19:338]ables him to disarm his adversary without endangering the life of either; a principle which makes the morality not less than the prudence of fighting to depend upon a man’s cunning of fence.

A strong contrast to the subtlety, the fine perception, and the power over the passions evinced by Richardson, is presented by his rival Fielding, (1707-1754,) who, with no command of the pathetic, no great share of wit, and no taste for that minute analysis of sentiment and wire-drawing of description in which our English Marivaux indulges, has yet maintained a more general and permanent popularity, by a combination of qualities well suited for the purpose. His grasp of observation led him to select with unerring sagacity, the leading traits of ordinary character, and to epitomize nature with skill, instead of transcribing her at full length. His field of delineation admits of such variety and contrast, that in fact it excludes none but the highest and most poetical elements, in which Fielding had neither power of observation or conception. His flow of animal spirits and healthy vivacity of manner, contrast strangely with the Dutch finishing of Richardson’s pencilling, but are as well suited to the active, out-of-door scenes which Fielding loved to draw, in his pictures of imbroglios at ale-houses, and the stirring life of the road, as the pains-taking inventories of Richardson were to his still-life interiors, and the drowsy monotony of the occupations of their inhabitants. To these he added, at least in his great work, Tom Jones, the charm of a plot of unrivalled skill, in which the complex threads of interest are all brought to bear upon the catastrophe in a manner equally unexpected and simple, a grave humour, and power of quiet satire unmixed with caricature, in which he is equally superior to Richardson and to Smollett. And with his other requisites he combined a knowledge of English life, both in its better features and its deformities, by which we mean, of the essential qualities of men, as modified at that time by the accidents of situation, education, and pursuits,—the result, perhaps, of a long, and not always reputable experience,— to which Richardson, surrounded by a circle of female gossips, and weaving out his materials in his quiet back shop, purely from the stores of his imagination, can make but slender pretension.

Amelia, much as it was admired by Johnson, is greatly inferior to Tom Jones. If the tone of the latter be far from high, that of Amelia is creeping and vulgar in no ordinary degree. Booth has Jones’ vices with an additional shade of meanness. Half the plot turns on the embarrassments of debt and contrivances to make both ends meet; and one or other of the characters is generally in a spunging house. Such, too, is the infirmity of human nature, that we really find it difficult to preserve a sufficiently romantic respect for the heroine, pretty and amiable as she is, when the saucepan is seldom out of her hand.
“Nec tantum veneris quantum studiosa culiuae.”

The finish is put to the whole by the accident which mars even the personal attractions of the heroine; for though the public were willing to regard Clarissa, after the outrage to her honour, with undiminished sympathy, it is certain they have not been equally indulgent to Amelia, after the misfortune of the broken nose.

We have already, however, in our biographical notice of Fielding, quoted so amply from Sir Walter Scott’s critique upon his genius and works, that instead of pursuing an exhausted theme, we refer our readers to that article.

The name of Fielding always suggests that of his rival Smollett (1721-1771,) though, as writers of fiction, they rather admit of being contrasted than compared. They have, in fact, very few, if any, points in common; agreeing only perhaps in a preference for the delineation of the comic, or the common, over the impassioned and poetical. They chose different departments in novel writing, and they cultivated them by different means. As Fielding was the faithful and graphic painter of all the common features of character, so' the extraordinary and the eccentric were the peculiar appanage of Smollett. He either did not feel sufficiently the charm of the natural in character, and its power of endless recombination in the hands of a great artist, or he doubted his own powers, at least in comparison with Fielding, of extracting novelty from such simple materials. But the sphere of humorous exaggeration appeared to be open to him, without the awe of a predecessor, or the dread of a rival; on that, therefore, he concentrated his powers of mind, neglecting in a great measure the other requisites of fiction; and undoubtedly with a success, which leaves him, within the province which he was the first to occupy, and with the occupation of which he was content, still the undisputed sovereign. No one has ever yet equalled him in the observation, or where that does not serve his purpose, the creation of oddities and exceptional characters which never did or could exist, but still with just enough of humanity about them, to give us an interest in their eccentric movements, or in the invention of combinations of burlesque incidents not always of the best odour, which his fertile fancy showers forth spontaneously as from a cornucopia; mistakes, rencounters, equivoques, whimsicalities of speech or action, all generally the best calculated to bring out in high raised and l udicrous relief the comic aberrations of the character represented, and to develope its latent madness; and never failing, at all events, to produce that result which Smollett seemed far more studious to attain than that of “purging the passions by pity or terror ;” namely, the excitement of a broad-grin mirth, and “laughter holding both his sides.” That the characters, where they have any decided features at all, are generally caricatures; for instance, that such commodores and lieutenants as Trunnion and Hatchway, never floated even under the primitive flag of Benbow; that the absurdities of Pallet are painted an inch thick; that by no human possibility could such an accumulation of comic disasters have befallen the characters of the tale, may, and indeed must be granted, even by Smollett’s warmest admirers. But if, following Smollett’s own example, we throw nature mainly out of the question, and look to what seems to have been his real aim, the objection of want of verisimilitude, while it may retain its truth, seems to lose half its force, and, we may add, wholly its power of conviction. It is in vain to point out the extravagance of the scene where Jolter, in an agony of terror, on hearing the direction given to put on the dead lights in the storm off Calais, goes through the steps of a mathematical proposition with infinite fervour, instead of a prayer; or to criticise the manoeuvres of Trunnion, tacking his way to church on his wedding day in consequence of ahead wind;— when the reader cannot see the force of the objection, through tears of laughter. In that consummation which he chiefly aimed at, and in which he rarely fails, Smollett has gained his end ;— solvuntur risu tabula; the sense of the improbability of the conceptions is lost in the irrepressible merriment which they occasion.

Humour, then, was the quality in which Smollett felt himself strongest; character, incident, the excitement of the feelings, were obviously with him minor considerations. There is no difficulty in discriminating his style of humour from that of Fielding. Fielding’s is calmεr, chaster, perhaps of a higher kind than Smollett’s, but it certainly has not its breadth, force, and felicity. As Smollett could hardly have created in its main features so gentle a humourist as Parson Adams, so he probably could have scarcely imagined a stroke of humour so delicate and appropriate to the character, as when the Parson offers to walk ten miles to fetch his sermon against Vanity,in order to convince his auditor of his total freedom from that vice. But neither, on the other hand, could he have imagined the feast after the manner of the ancients, the apparition of Pipes to the Commodore, the terrors of Pallet on learning [7:19:339]the supposed conditions of his emancipation from the Bastille, or the ludicrous concatenation of mischances which beset the luckless inmates of the Inn in Flanders “doing or suffering.” Some scenes of this sort, in which Fielding enters into competition with Smollett, such as those at the Inn at Upton, are among the least successful in his novels. The effort to raise the waters, the malice prepense in the preparation of the comic machinery, is too obvious; and after all, though he creates abundance of confusion, he raises but few smiles.

In another quality, though he has but rarely availed himself of his powers in this respect, Smollett far surpassed Fielding; we mean in his power of exciting the emotions of terror,or the sublime. From scenes of this kind, Fielding, knowing the prosaic turn of his own mind, and the limits of his invention, kept at a respectful distance; Smollett, who felt within himself the spirit of a poet, has occasionally ventured upon them, and with complete success. The robber scene in the old woman’s hut in Count Fathom, though often imitated since, still remains one of the most impressive and agitating night pieces of its kind; and the sublimity of the situation on ship board, where Random sits chained to the poop during an engagement, covered with the blood and brains of the wounded, and screaming in delirium, has been often pointed out.

The morality of Smollett and Fielding is nearly on a par; with this difference, that the slight dash of generosity which is infused into the blackguardism of Tom Jones, while it renders him more natural, makes him at the same time more dangerous than the selfish and often ruffianly heroes of Smollett; whom we despise or dislike, even while laughing at the cruel frolics in which they indulge. The heroes of the latter are mere animals, good-natured or savage, as the fit strikes them; the heroines, with the exception perhaps of Aurelia Darnel in Sir Lancelot Greaves, the weakest of Smollet’s works, have been justly described as objects rather of appetite than affection. In regard, indeed, to any thing like purity of morals, or gentlemanly feeling, the inferiority both of Smollett and Fielding to Richardson is obvious. Richardson sometimes mistook his means, but his aim was certainly always moral. On the contrary, both the theory and the practice of the justice were latitudinarian; and Smollett, though in real life a man of pure morals, had a boundless toleration in fiction for certain vices; for most, indeed, which did not imply want of spirit, courage, or pecuniary generosity.

In the unity of conception and coherence of incident which the plot of the novel, though more pliable than that of the drama demands, Fielding, in his two principal works (for Joseph Andrews was merely aparody on Richardson , sPa∞e∕α) has a great advantage over Smollett, whose plots indeed in general scarcely deserve the name, being simply a series of strange accidents, odd rencontres, tricks and frolics, making little or no progress towards the only catastrophe which Smollett seems to have in view, namely, the marriage of his hero. In his Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Count Fathom, Smollett adopted the easy inartificial plan of Gil Bias, in which we are carried through a succession of scenes where the personages are constantly changing, and those who take part in the close of the story, are quite different from those by whom we are surrounded at its commencement. Fielding, on the contrary, both in his Tom Jones and Amelia, is singularly attentive to regularity of plan, and to the dexterous evolution and winding up of his plot, which he regarded as of vital importance. From the very commencement we perceive that he keeps his conclusion clearly in view, “and sees as from a tower the end of all.” From this attention to symmetry, and tendency of all the incidents towards the catastrophe, his best work has been not inaptly termed a prose epic; it is at all events a happy accommodation of the principles of the epic, so far as they could be rendered applicable, to the manner of the novel. One exception ought perhaps to be made from this remark on the imperfection of Smollett’s plots, in favour of that of Humphrey Clinker, in which the plot, though not of much art, is naturally evolved, and a quiet little family romance is gracefully combined with the usual gallery of oddities which Smollett never fails to lay before us. In all respects, this is the most pleasing of his performances. While Lesmahago may rank with the very best of his extravagances, there is more of character and less of caricature in the testy, yet kind-hearted, Matthew Bramble “frosty but kindly,” than in any personage he has painted; and though the humour, as usual, is dashed with filth, without a soupçon of which indeed Smollett seems always to have thought it wanted pungency, the tale is entirely free from that indecency which deforms both Roderick Random send Peregrine Pickle. We rather think, too, that Smollett had the merit of originating in this novel that species of the humourous which arises from bad spelling, and which Sheridan afterwards applied to mistakes of words in his Mrs. Malaprop; a humble kind of humour no doubt in itself, yet capable, as Smollett has proved, of powerfully aiding the ludicrous effect.

Equal genius, though far more deformed by affectation, is visible in Sterne, (1713—1768)the first two volumes of whose Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759∙ If a regular progress of incidents towards a catastrophe, were an essential requisite in a novel, it would be difficult to bring the works of Sterne within the protection of that definition. Story he has none to tell; at all events he tells it not. But, “what is a plot good for,” says Bayes, “except to bring in good things,” and Sterne adopted the theory of the dramatist in its full license. At the conclusion of the eighth volume, Tristram is not emancipated from the nursery, and had Sterne lived to fulfil his threat of carrying on his work, by the aid of a vegetable diet, through as many more, the Tristrapaedia, we fear, would still have made no material progress. Sterne’s singular work owes its interest, as every one knows, not to the narrative, which is broken and interrupted by cross currents of the most wayward and whimsical description, far exceeding all the fair license of digression, but to his power of seizing on and bringing forward into distinct consciousness, as Coleridge says, some of those points on which every man is a humorist, and to the masterly manner in which he has brought out the characteristics of two beings of the most opposite natures, the elder Shandy and Toby, and surrounded them with a group of followers sketched with equal life and individuality: in the Corporal, the obstetric Doctor Slop; Yorick,the lively and careless parson; the widow Wadman, and Susannah.

The clue which Sterne chiefly follows through the mazes of character, is humour;—humour of a very high and peculiar kind, perfectly original, at least in English. For that species of riotous humour arising from comic peculiarities of person, and combinations of ludicrous mischances, Sterne has little taste; though the admirably painted scene, where Obadiah on the cart horse, careering round the corner like a comet, oversets Dr. Slop in a whirlpool of mud ;—and the cross bills filed by the Doctor and Susannah against each other in applying the cataplasm, show, that if he had considered this the highest walk of humour, he might have revelled in it as easily as Smollett himself. But, like Fielding, he preferred the humour which arises from bringing out by light and happy touches, and as if unconsciously, the secrets of character; only with this difference in his favour, that with Sterne the humour is steeped in sensibility. Flowing, as it does, as much from the heart as the head, it speaks also to the affections; calm smiles ripple over the countenance as we read, but tears are in the next degree. Thus, in Sterne, humour and feeling helghten and set off each other; the pathetic rises in gentle relief out of the background of the comic, and sinks gracefully and imperceptibly back into it again. It is this, for instance, which gives so irresistible a charm to the story of Le Fevre, and the Corporal’s account in the kitchen [7:19:340]of the death of Tristram’s elder brother, enforced by the eloquent stroke of dropping the hat, as if a lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it. There is nothing sneering, nothing unkindly, nothing that revolts the better feelings in his playful irony. Circum proecordia ludU. That of Swift and Voltaire is blighting like an east wind; the sympathies of the heart close themselves up against it; but beneath the genial and balmy humour of Cervantes and Sterne, they relax and blow like flowers expanding beneath the west wind in spring.

The wonderful resources of characteristic invention, and the very finest perception of the limits of true humour, are shown in the contrasted characters of the two brothers, the main personages in the history; the man of pure intellect, restless, nervous, eloquent, hair-splitting, half-crazed by learned theories, which he insists on carrying into action, craving sympathy, and yet courting discussion, as delineated in the elder Shandy; and the man of pure good nature and benevolence, as drawn in Toby; without learning, with no head for reasoning, but with a heart always in the right place; eloquent too, in his way, when his feelings are touched, or his favourite pursuits depreciated, (witness his animated and beautiful defence of his reasons for prolonging the war) chaste as a woman, gentle, harmless and credulous as a child; riding his hobby, in short, in so captivating a manner, that, if the truth were told, most of his readers are in their hearts inclined to mount along with him. There are few, we suppose, who have not been seduced into something of his own mania by the scene on the bowling green, when he discovers the ingenious invention by which Trim, having converted the jack-boots into mortars, is directing a hot fire from these engines against the counterscarp of Lisle; when the tobacco pipes, withdrawn from the mouth of the corporal, are gradually insinuated into his own, merely to try them; and puff succeeds puff, till the enthusiast is swept into the torrent of a furious cannonade. Nothing, too, can be at once more humourous or characteristic than that scene where Toby mistakes the elder Shandy’s quotation from Sulpicius’ consolatory letter to Cicero, for a real account of his brother’s trip to the Levant, a stroke of humour so natural in the circumstances, and yet so original, that it would of itself be sufficient to prove that Sterne was a man of genius.

The two great defects of Sterne, as noticed by Sir Walter Scott, are his affectation and his indefensible indecency. For his plagiarisms from other authors, we regard as of little importance. So ingeniously are they turned to account, and so much in general does Sterne improve what he borrows, that he may fairly claim in them that right of property which the civil law allowed in articles where the labour bestowed by the borrower exceeded the intrinsic value of the material on which it was bestowed. It must be confessed, however, that few writers have carried their coolness and assurance in this respect so far as Sterne has done, who, not content with denouncing the plagiarisms of authors, has actually stolen from Burton the passage in which he exposes the iniquities of his neighbours.

But the other objections less admit of defence. The affectation of Sterne is the more to be regretted, because his manner in its happiest moods is the very perfection of a lively, spirited, spoken style, idiomatic, imaginative, pliant, and varied. “Writing, when properly managed,” he himself observes, “is but a different name for conversation.” Unfortunately he did not always conform his practice to his precept. He is sometimes fade in his sentimentality, and aiming after a sort of false sublime in his imagery. Some portions of the story of Maria are examples of the first; the well-known personification of the recording angel in the close of Le Fevre, is an instance of the second. Still more unworthy of Sterne are those quackeries of the black page and the white one, the sudden transitions and affected openings of the chapters, with other harlequinades of authorship, which are carried to excess in Tristram Shandy.

The indecency of Sterne is more obtrusive and indefensible than that of either Fielding or Smollett; whose highly-coloured scenes seem to be the result of an unchecked imagination, running on heedless whether its course lie through purity or filth. Sterne, on the other hand, goes coldly and deliberately in search of impurity; seeks for it in books, refines upon it, mixes it up with his reflections, and is continually insinuating some equivoque or double entendre into scenes where we can ill bear with such adulteration.

Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, are the four great novelists of this period (the reign of George II.) which was pre-eminently the age of novel-writing in England. For though we should indeed be sorry to undervalue the merits of Goldsmith, or the charm of his Vicar of Wakefield, we cannot quite rank the powers displayed in that delightful little tale, which appeared in 1763, so highly as the varied invention displayed by the writers we have named, upon the broader canvass which they selected. To use his own words, it has many faults, and a hundred things might plausibly be said to prove them beauties. Fortunately, they lie more in the minor parts, than in the essentials of the tale. In fact, the improbability of the plot is only equalled by the wonderful truth, nature and keeping of the principal character, for the “limae labor” which, in this instance, Goldsmith willingly bestowed upon his style, and on the creation and apposition of traits of character, be scrupled to waste upon the selection of his incidents. The real interest lies in the development in the character of the amiable Vicar, so rich in heavenly, so poor in earthly wisdom ;—possessing little for himself, yet ready to make that little less, whenever misery appeals to his compassion ;—with enough of literary vanity about him to shew that he shares the weaknesses of our nature,—ready to be imposed upon by cosmogonies and fictitious bills of exchange, and yet commanding, by the simple and serene dignity of goodness, the respect even of the profligate, and making “those who came to mock remain to pray.” Doubtless, the probability and look of life which a character drawn with such quiet strokes of the pencil, and with such sobriety of colouring, possesses, is in some measure owing to the fact, that not a few of the incidents of which Goldsmith has availed himself, are drawn from circumstances in his personal history, such as the mistake of setting out to teach the French English, without recollecting that it was a necessary preliminary for the tutor to acquire a little French himself; but the skill which can make such trifles in real life subservient to the purposes of real fiction, is scarcely less worthy of praise than would have been their original invention. Perhaps there is no better proof of the broad and general truth of delineation which a novel possesses, than our being in the habit of resorting to it in conversation for cases in point, and comic illustrations of our opinions. In this respect the Vicar of Wakefield forms a storehouse of allusion. How naturally does any ridiculous investment in Mexican mines, or Spanish stock, recall to our recollection Moses’ bargain for the gross of green spectacles? Who is there that has not been reminded of the aristocratic Miss Skeggs turning out to be no better than she should be, notwithstanding her intimacy with the Duchess, and her taste for Shakspeare and the musical glasses, by some case of the same kind within our own experience, where, reversing the denouement of the Double Arrangement, the Knight Templar of the company has sunk into the waiter? And for our ow n part, we must admit, that we have never been able to treat with due gravity any allusion to the learned speculations of Manetho, Berosus, or Sanconiathon, from their indissoluble connexion in our minds with the more finished cosmogony of Jenkinson.

In one respect Goldsmith rises conspicuously superior to his brethren; he has no passages, which, dying, he need have [7:19:341]wished to blot, and his characters and his incidents are all calculated to call forth only the better feelings of our nature. Virginibus puerisque might have been his appropriate and uncontested motto.

The great novelists to whom we have alluded, and particularly Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, had of course many imitators. But the minuteness of Richardson was found to be intolerable in any hands but his own, and his manner in this country at least, though not in France and Germany, was soon abandoned. Amongst the numerous imitations of Fielding’s manner, most of which are now forgotten, the Henry of Cumberland (1752—1811), is probably the most respectable. Cumberland possessed that degree of talent which enabled him, both in dramatic composition, and in the novel, to produce performances which are read with pleasure, though they seldom rouse our interest, and never impress us with the idea of a creative genius. Accordingly, both his Arundel and his Henry have enjoyed a fair measure of popularity, particularly the latter, in which a story of tolerable interest is made the vehicle of displaying considerable acquaintance with English life in the lower ranks, derived from Cumberland’s familiarity with such scenes in his early residence in Kent,—while the homeliness of these pictures is relieved by many rural landscapes perfectly English. The tale has the fault of Pamela, that aims at teaching virtue through scenes that border very closely on vice; while, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, Cumberland reverses the usual process of courtship, and “throws upon the softer sex the task of wooing, which is more gracefully as well as naturally the province of the man.” The characters have little novelty; Cumberland was indebted for them to Joseph Andrews, and he took the idea of his plan and style from Tam Jones. Henry is another version of Joseph himself, which Cumberland somehow seems not to have perceived to be a caricature created in the mere spirit of parody; but the portrait of an amiable, enthusiastic, and yet absurd Methodist parson in Ezekiel Daw, has an air of originality, even when placed beside that of Parson Adams, by which it was obviously, suggested.

The imitations of Smollett’s manner were not numerous, and, with one exception, totally without merit. We allude to The Adventures of a Guinea, by Charles Johnstone, which appeared in 1761, in which a series of scenes and personages in different walks of life are brought before us through the somewhat inartificial method of making a coin, which shifts through the hands of successive proprietors, the historian of their follies and their vices; a contrivance very inferior indeed to the ingenious machinery by which Asmodeus unveils to Don Cleofas the secrets of-Spanish life. In The Adventures of α Guinea, the author seems to have had before him both Le Sage and Smollett as models; but in the result he exhibits little of the gay good-humoured touch of the Frenchman, and nothing of the cordial merriment of the Scotchman. Where Le Sage painted follies, and Smollett frolics and absurdities, Johnstone, on whom some have conferred the high title of a prose Juvenal, delineated with a sarcastic and energetic brevity, the darkest vices and crimes of an age in which both political and domestic profligacy prevailed, and were paraded abroad with no ordinary degree of assurance. “In Johnstone’s time,” says Sir Walter Scott, “the reform which was introduced by the private virtues and patriotism of George III. had not commenced; and he might well have said, with such an ardent temper as he seems to have possessed, ‘ Difficile est satyram non scribere.' He has accordingly indulged his wit to the utmost, and as most of his characters were living persons, then easily recognised, he held the mirror to nature even when it reflects such horrible features. His language is firm and energetic; his power of personifying character striking and forcible, and the personages of his narrative move, breathe, and speak in all the freshness of life.” This is high, and indeed we think, with deference, exaggerated praise. Who remembers or can name a single character which Johnstone has drawn, except perhaps his forcible but odious caricature of Whitefield? What scene of real interest or passion has he painted in such a manner as to give it a home in our memories, like the better scenes of Fielding or Le Sage? Not one: and indeed, bad as the age which he painted was, we believe he has greatly exaggerated its vices, or at least his one-sided views have led him to keep out of sight its redeeming points and countervailing virtues. Hence the impression the book leaves on the mind is one of oppression. It leads us along all the gloomy, and foul, and noisome passages of life, and we escape from it with the feeling of relief with which we would emerge from a vault in which the air was loaded with noxious vapour.

Sterne is perhaps the only one of our great novelists who has found an imitator of genius, in Mackenzie (1745-1831); for although in his Man of the World, and Julia de Rou-bigne, Mackenzie has deviated from the manner of Sterne, and formed a composite manner, in which the characteristics of several writers are blended with his own, yet there can be little doubt that the spirit of Sterne, in his pathetic passages, in a great measure inspired The Man of Feeling, and prompted that “illustration of the richer and finer sensibilities of the human breast,” which Sir Walter Scott points out as the “key-note” on which he formed his tales of fictitious woe. In some obvious respects, no doubt, Mackenzie improved upon his model; as in rejecting the licem tiousness of Sterne’s wit, retrenching his episodical digressions, his numerous impertinencies, and intrusive buffoonery, and keeping the strain of feeling which he wishes to create more unbroken; but as writers of genius, there surely can be no comparison between them. Mackenzie has none of those charming touches which hover with such a fine ambiguity between the pathetic and the humorous,— like Toby’s opening the window, and liberating the fly which had been buzzing about him all day,—and which operate, like spells, upon the heart. We fear, then, that the spirit of nationality, and the bias of private friendship, has led Sir Walter Scott somewhat to exaggerate the claims of Mackenzie, who, if he has less affectation in mere manner and style, seems to us to have more affectation of feeling than the author of Tristram Shandy. In fact, Mackenzie betrays in some passages of his novels a tendency towards that unhealthy sentimentalism which was afterwards carried to such a sickly excess by inferior imitators of Sterne. Such is certainly the case in what is commonly considered the most powerful, though, we think, the least pleasing of his works, Julia de Roubigne. No doubt, if the chief aim of fiction were “to send the hearers weeping to their beds,” Mackenzie might claim the merit of having attained it. But though the distresses of the story may be in themselves naturally pourtrayed, the constant monotony of melancholy which it presents to us is not so; it is morbid and out of nature, and the feeling with which it is perused, which is that of exhaustion and uneasiness, shews that the writer has missed the great aim of fiction, which is to make even suffering minister to a soothing feeling of sympathy, and to leave upon the mind at the close a sentiment of consolation.

the Man of the World is exposed in some respects to the same objection. The suffering, the accumulation of misfortunes which are heaped upon the innocent Annes-leys, through the heartless villainy of Sindall, are too unmitigated. The story wants repose, relief, and sunshine. It is like an avenue of cypresses terminating in a tomb. The Man of Feeling, the first of Mackenzie’s productions, is, after all, the best. It is more unlaboured than the others, has more of the first freshness of the author’s mind about it; and its brief manner, and quicker succession of situations,—for they can hardly be called incidents, relieve it from [7:19:342]Weadmitthattheauthorof the Castle of Otranto did not trust exclusively to such materials of interest. But granting that the general outlines of “his feudal tyrant, his distressed damsels, his resigned yet dignified churchman,” are suffi that sombre uniformity which, in his larger novels, produces such a depressing effect.

The Rasselas of Dr. Johnson (1709-1783), though it wears the form of a tale, has but slender pretensions to be included amongst the class of novels, for it has neither progressive incident nor character. It is a series of dialogues and moral reflections, very solemnly and beautifully written, tinged with that tone of mournfulness and despondency so likely to be the prevailing feeling of his mind in the composition of a work intended to defray the expenses of a mother’s funeral. Rasselas is, in fact, the Vanity of human wishes in prose; and its incidents, if such they may be called, have even less pretensions to connected interest than those of Candide, to which it may be regarded as a moral and philosophical antithesis.

Judging, indeed, from Rasselas, and from the other writings of Johnson, it may be safely assumed, that his success as a novelist would not have been much greater than as a dramatic poet. He has nowhere shewn the least power of creation, by stepping out of himself, and putting on by the force of imagination the nature of others. Through the disguise of all the successive characters which he is obliged to assume in the Rambler, the sturdy, controversial, and somewhat pompous moralist stands confessed; and whether he writes as a fine lady, a fop, a blood, or an elderly gentleman, still, like Puck, “we know the man by the Athenian garments he hath on.” Independently of this, his views of life would certainly have been untrue, inasmuch as they were one-sided. Far from being disposed “to make the happiness he could not find,” the tendency of his mind,—in consequence, perhaps, of a constitutional melancholy,—was rather to unmake and neutralise the elements of comfort by which human life, in the average, is surrounded. Had he devoted himself in earnest to fictitious composition, he would have lent his eloquence and power of forcible statement, to shape the world of romance according to the gloomy fashion which the reality presented to his eye; and in an inky coat, indeed, or a drab-coloured suit at best, very unlike the peach-blossom of his friend Goldsmith, he would in all probability have arrayed it.

About 1769, we witness the revival, though in a new shape, of the old taste for Romance. The delineation of life as it actually existed, was found to afford too little scope to minds who aspired after the imaginative and poetical, and who could not see why natural delineation of character and manners might not be combined with striking events, and with the picture of the higher passions; why, as Walpole expresses it, in his preface to the Castle of Otranto, “the fancy might not be left to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence to create more interesting situations, while the mortal agents in the drama still conducted themselves according to the rules of probability.”

In the first shape, however, in which romance reappeared, after this temporary slumber, the delineation of character occupied, it must be owned, but a very subordinate place. A little more attention was given to verisimilitude of manners, and much was done to abbreviate the tedious style of the old prose romance, and to throw life and movement into the narrative by dialogue, and by the omission of unimportant incidents not bearing on the catastrophe; but the main efforts of our first modern romance writers were directed chiefly to the excitement of that feeling of love of the marvellous which exists more or less in every human breast. They chose for their favourite themes the varieties of the supernatural.

“Somnia, terrores magico, miracula, sagas,

Nocturnos lemures portentaque."

ciently correct, we are at a loss to perceive in any of his characters that individuality which gives to such pictures their chief value. To us they seem light, sketchy, and somewhat vague, although we think it quite possible that the effect produced by greater truth and distinctness of feature in the mortal agents of the piece, might not have harmonised with the extravagant demands upon the imagination which the author makes by his supernatural machinery. We agree with Sir Walter Scott, in thinking Walpole acted with judgment in leaving his machinery without those attempts at explanation introduced by Mrs. Radcliffe, always inadequate, and even throwing an air of ridicule over the mysteries of the piece upon a second perusal. But we cannot concur with him in his toleration of the extent to which Walpole has carried the marvels and improbabilities of his romance.

The apparition of Alfonso in the moonlight, dilated to a gigantic form, is impressive, and in certain moods of the mind even the skeleton ghost in the hermit’s cowl may have its terrors. But Clara Reeve was certainly right in the protest which she enters in her preface against the introduction of such machinery as that of a sword so large as to require a hundred men to lift it; a helmet that, by its own weight, forces a passage through a court yard into an arched vault, and crushes a boy to death; or a picture walking out of its frame. The effect of such violent instruments of terror is suicidal; they destroy the very feeling they were intended to create, and give to the romance the air of a nursery tale. 1 ndeed, were it not for the singular charm of the style, which, like all Walpole’s compositions, is of the purest and most idiomatic English, and terse and condensed in a very high dcgree, we feel persuaded that the Castle of Otranto, although the first specimen of the modem romance, would at the present day find few admirers.

In some respects, then, we think the Old English Baron of Clara Reeve was an improvement on the Castle of Otranto.

For there the marvellous was brought within some limit of proportion; “the extravagant and erring spirit hied to his confine,” and, consequently, so far as regarded the creation of an impression of superstitious terror, or giving an air of probability and keeping to her narrative, we must admit, that her ghost of Lord Lovel, who is always exhibited under the obscurity of a dim religiouslight, did, in our youthful days, produce upon us a certain species of awe. In other respects, we rather fear the apprehension which is expressed in her preface, namely, that in avoiding the defects of Walpole, the spirit of his wild composition might evaporate, was not altogether without foundation. The style of the narrative in her hands became heavy, often dry and vulgar, like the ancient chronicle she professes to follow; her dialogue is peculiarly flat and cumbrous, and the plot deformed, and rendered tedious by trifling incidents which now appear to us needlessly homely; and yet the strong interest with which, as we can state from experience, this romance is perused at an early age, is a proof that in the cardinal point of exciting curiosity, and a feeling of mysterious interest, the ruder narrative of Clara Reeve effects, in a great measure, what all the liveliness of style, the deeper antiquarian reading, and more creative fancy of Walpole, failed to attain.

But this species of romance w riting was probably carried to its perfection by Mrs. Radcliffe (1764-1823), who, in her own walk of fiction, has never been excelled, though opinions may differ as to the comparative rank which she holds among writers of fiction, and also as to the soundness of that principle of composition which led her systematically to unravel her own spells, and to attempt an explanation by natural means, of effects which we had at first been encouraged to refer to the agency of supernatural causes. Indeed, we might rather say, that, in regard to this last point, there is no room for doubt, and that this system of explanations is exposed to every possible objection ;—as totally inadequate in general, to account for the effects ascribed to it; as run[7:19:343]ning counter to the whole tone of sentiment created up to the period of explanation,—as disappointing the pride of the reader, who feels offended at the thought that he has expended so much anxiety and terror on a mere “painted devil,” and a succession of mockeries; and is consequently annoyed at this common-place anticlimax, after his nerves have been tuned for grand wonders, instead of the discovery of paltry images of wax-work. Indeed, it is one of the strongest proofs of the redeeming genius which Mrs. Radcliffe has thrown into her tales, constructed, as they are, upon so unsatisfactory a plan, that they bear a second perusal at all; or that having discovered in one or two cases the inadequate and puerile nature of what appeared at first so appalling and formidable, we still feel eager for the solution of the remaining mysteries, and can hardly persuade ourselves but that something strange and fearful does lurk, after all, within her deserted chambers, and beneath her faded tapestry.

It is the more to be regretted that Mrs. Radcliffe adopted this principle, because all the excellencies of her peculiar genius might have been displayed with equal effect, if she had chosen a more satisfactory plan of composition. Why she should have hesitated to admit of an actual spiritual agency, it is difficult to discover. Fear, when its object is something corporeal, is no doubt the basest and vulgarest of feelings. But when its source lies in the invisible, and when we shrink at the thoughts of the visionary and the eternal, it puts on the character of sublimity. Standing, as we do, on the confines of a dim eternity, which we believe but cannot see, the feeling which prompts us to a communion with the world of spirits, and yet makes us shrink and tremble at our own daring, exists to such an extent in all minds, and not the least in the most heroic, as to afford a basis on which high imagination may always operate with effect, so as to justify the artful use of the supernatural. We say the artful use, for every thing depends on the skill with which such machinery is used, the address of the preparation, and the judgment with which the accessories and the background are selected. Who feels the slightest symptom of awe when the shade of Amphiaraus appears before the assembled people to forbid the banns between Eriphyle and Alemaeon, or that of Ninus emerges in broad day from the tomb, in Voltaire’s Semiramis? Who does not,—at least in reading the play,—experience a pleasing thrill of fear, when, in the depth of a December night, with the sea moaning behind, and the bell then beating one, the majesty of buried Denmark advances with spectral stalk along the platform of Elsineur? We grant there has been few successful attempts in modern times to keep up the interest of a story turning upon machinery avowedly supernatural, but we are far from thinking that such an attempt might not, even yet, in our days of illumination, be made by a man of genius, so as to move the pulses of terror with complete success.

But besides the actual field of the supernatural, there are many equivocal phenomena in our nature, lying within that debateable land where mind and body meet, such as dreams, omens, and presentiments, which admit of being referred by the mind, in an excited state, to supernatural causes, and which may be employed with powerful effect by writers of fiction, without the possession of that creative genius and knowledge of the human heart which are required to present the sheeted dead in a shape and garb of terror calculated to impress and awe the imagination. And such, in fact, is the diluted shape in which the supernatural is generally presented by our modern romance writers.

From all these sources of emotion, Mrs. Radcliffe has unfortunately excluded herself by her system of sufficient reason founded on natural causes. And yet it is wonderful what a magical power she exercises within the field to which she restricts herself. No one ever seems to have understood better the art of preparation, the attunement of the mind to the key of the supernatural, by a long train of half-heard sounds, and glimpses of sights, which the fancy, amidst night and silence, works up for itself into images of things which it fears to contemplate.
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread;
And having once looked round*, walks on,
And turns no more his head,—
Because be knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

And perhaps the strongest proof of her judgment is to be found in the economy and reserve with which she employs the talisman of terror. In her hands slight circumstances and half hints are made to produce all the effect of fearful witcheries or scenes of bloodshed and horror. The clang of a distant door, a footfall or a track of blood upon a staircase, a strain of music floating over a forest, a figure pacing a platform in silence, some wandering voice following us, “with airy tongue that syllables men’s names,” through the passages of a decaying chateau, the heaving of the tapestry of a bed in some deserted chamber, nay, at last a very rat behind the arras, become invested with a mysterious dignity, and work upon the imagination like spells. The disappearance of Ludovico for instance, in the haunted apartment of Chateau Le Blanc, where he had undertaken to watch, prepared as it is by a train of little details which act upon the nerves, and by the masterly ghost story of Bevys of Lancaster, which he is represented as perusing, may be safely pointed out as a coup de rnaitre in the art of raising to its highest pitch, the feeling of curiosity and suspense.

Whether Mrs. Radcliffe possessed much power of painting character seems doubtful; it is at least certain she has shown but little. In such calculations of probability, we can only use Sebastian’s words.—“What had been is unknown, what is, appears.” She seems indeed to have borrowed a hint from Bayes, which like many other remarks of that worthy, have more good sense in them than was perhaps apparent to the noble parodist, and purposely to have “underwrit some parts in order to set off the rest in other words, she has systematically kept the delineation of her characters subordinate to her main object, the maintenance of a mysterious curiosity, which never is, but always is to be gratified. Her tales, indeed, would have probably gained little by greater discrimination in this respect, if in truth the species of interest produced by the natural would not have rather interfered with that arising from the marvellous. For her object, it was sufficient that as the representatives of classes, rather than individuals, her personages should be sketched spiritedly but lightly; that the straight-laced heroine in white satin, should be duly supported by the gossiping waiting woman in white muslin, and that the bandit chief of the Appenines, the hired robber, the scowling monk, or the chattering peasant should wear with a natural air the outward and conventional badges of their calling. The nearest approach she has made to character, is in her Schidoni, whose outward appearance is most picturesquely and impressingly described, while the inscrutable mystery which at first hangs over the inward man, the dark hints which are dropped concerning him by others, and the gradual revelation of his designs in his conversations with the Marchioness, powerfully stimulate our interest, and make us follow all his actions with an instinctive feeling of alarm. The misfortune is that even in this, the most finished of her portraits, the Schidoni of the second is really not the Schidoni of the first portion of the tale. When “the father softens,” the confessor unfortunately can no longer “remain fixed ;” when he ceases to be the mere evil spirit of the romance, puts on the look even of a guilty humanity, and turns out to be simply “a bold bad man,” he loses bis identity, and with that his influence over the imagination.

Mrs. Radcliffe may claim the merit of being the first to [7:19:344]introduce landscape painting into her romances as a component part of the interest of the piece. The frequency of her pictures of external scenery, and their want of distinctness and local truth, have indeed been blamed by many who would willingly, on Puff’s principle, have abridged her descriptions of the rising sun, and dispensed with a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere. But it is certain that these descriptions, though occasionally tedious, and sometimes too obviously brought forward upon a principle of melo-dramatic contrast, have a powerful effect in heightening the impression communicated by the incidents or the sentiments. Set off against the calm beauty of a summer evening, or the magnificent gloom of a thunder storm, her pastoral or banditti groupes stand out with double effect; while to the charge of vagueness of description, it may be answered, that Mrs. Radcliffe is by no means vague, where distinctness of imagery is, or ought to be her object; as any one may satisfy himself who recalls to his recollection her description of the lonely house by the Mediterranean, with the scudding clouds, the screaming sea-birds, and the stormy sea, the scene selected for the murder of Ellena ;—or another picture, in the best manner of Salvator, of the first glimpse of the Castle of Udolpho rising over a mountain pass, with the slant sunbeam lighting up its ancient weather-beaten towers. Indeed, the whole description of that Appenine fastness, both without and within, is in the best style, not of literal indeed, but of imaginative painting—“fate sits on those dark battlements and frowns:” the very intricacy of its internal architecture, and its endless passages,—a mighty maze, and we fear without a plan,—only serve to deepen the impression of imprisonment and bewilderment and gloom.

Less, certainly, is to be said for those descriptions in verse with which her novels are rather profusely interspersed, and which are, of course, represented as emanating from some of the personages of her stories. Without denying the merit of some of her occasional verses, it is certain that she always shews more of the spirit of poetry in her prose. Indeed, independently of the mediocrity of many of these effusions, they often assume a ludicrous air from their contrast with the circumstances under which they are produced. Under all situations of alarm and anxiety, in the seclusion of convents, and in the castles of Condottieri, where drunken ruffians are brawling “along the corridor,” paper, pencils, and poetical enthusiasm are never wanting to her heroines, and the sun is seldom suffered to rise or set without a tribute to his beams. Indeed, it is even observable that the poetical sensibilities of her heroines generally become more lively after any domestic calamity, such as the demise of a parent; as Beau Clincher’s exuberance of spirits was accounted for by the fact, that he was in mourning for his father.

For a particular notice of the individual works of Mrs. Radcliffe, we refer to our biographical article on that subject. Two of them are now wholly and deservedly forgotten. Neither the Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, nor the Sicilian Romance, crowded with violent yet ineffective incidents, gave any indication of that ability which she afterwards displayed. Of her remaining fictions, it may be said in a word, that the Romance (>f the Forest, founded on a French cause celebre, has the fewest faults; that the Italian, though extremely unequal, and in the third volume a comparative failure, contains the most striking and dramatic scenes; but that the Mysteries of Udolpho is on the whole, and justly, considered the best.

To be fully enjoyed, the Romances of Mrs. Radcliffe must be perused in youth. In after age, they appear too uniformly visionary, and the straight-laced stiffness of her heroines, who never manifest the least warmth except in poetry, “female punctuation not permitting them to do more,” as Mrs. Malaprop observes, suggests the recollection of the pruderies of the pastoral and heroic romance. But when these tales are read in youth, and only remembered in manhood in their better portions, they leave upon the memory a pleasing impression of a varied pageant of gloomy castles and caves, moon-illumined streets and palaces, “dance and Provençal song and vintage mirth,” aerial music floating over haunted forests, or the chant of monk or nun borne to the ear over the waters of some Italian lake, amidst the stillness and the shadows of evening.

We have devoted a larger space to Mrs. Radcliffe than some may think justly due to the rank in fiction which she occupies,but we have done so,—first, because we think justice has seldom been done to the real genius which she threw into the style of fiction she chose to adopt, whatever may be its precise order of precedence in the calendar of fiction; and, secondly, because, although that style became more universally popular, and more generally imitated than any which had preceded it, she herself, with two exceptions only, which we shall notice, remains the solitary writer of genius by whom it has been adorned. The truth is, that the sarcasms which have been directed against the puerile horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe ought justly to have been confined to the extravagances of her successors, who imitated her manner without either her imagination or her judgment, and conceived that the surest means of producing effect consisted in pressing the springs of the terrible as far as they would go. In the hands of these, “imitated imitators,” the castles became twice as large and ten times as perplexing in their architecture; the heroine could not open an empty drawer without stumbling on a mysterious manuscript written by her father or mother; nor leave her room to take a twilight walk, of which heroines are always strangely fond, without stumbling on a nest of banditti; the gleam of daggers grew more incessant; the faces of the monks longer and more cadaverous, and the visits of ghosts so common-place, that they came at last to be viewed with the same indifference by the reader,as they were of old by honest Aubrey, or less honest Dr. Dee.

One word may be said in favour of the Romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and her school, addressed to those who think that every romance should embody the moral conveyed in the concluding couplet of the Mourning Bride. Their general tendency is moral, poetical justice is in most cases rigidly enforced, and crime punished,and virtue rewarded by some unexpected good fortune, even on this earth. “All this,” says Mr. Dunlop, “may be very absurd, but life, perhaps, has few better things than sitting at the chimney corner in a winter evening,after a well-spent day,and reading such absurdities.”

The two exceptions from the general dullness and common place of the imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe, are The Monk of M.G. Lewis, which appeared in 1796, and The Montoriο of Maturin, published in 1807, and among the last romances written on that now antiquated plan. Much injustice, we believe, was done to Lewis at the time. A single unfortunate remark of an irreligious tendency, and some descriptions of undue warmth, pardonable in a youth of twenty, and retrenched in the second edition, gave a blow to the popularity of this romance from which it never recovered. And yet the traces of considerable genius are visible both in its plan and in the execution of several of its powerful scenes. The mere hint of the story, that is to say, the general idea of the gradual corruption of a proud, and enthusiastic, and self-relying nature, was taken, as Lewis acknowledged, from that of the Santon Barsisa in the Guardian; the incident of the escape of the baroness from the banditti, was an expansion, executed with much skill, of the scene in the hut in Count Fathom; for the story of the bleeding nun, he was indebted to a German legend, while he has borrowed several hints for his wandering Jew from the incomprehensible Armenian of Schiller. But to these hackneyed materials he has given a force and look of novelty that are surprising; the escape, the conjuration scene, where the Jew, withdrawing the black ribband, unveils the burning cross on his [7:19:345]forehead; the procession of St. Clare by torch-light, where the abbess is torn to pieces, once read are not easily forgotten. Lewis also avoided Mrs. Radcliffe’s error; his ghosts are real, and his devil genuine, though, as is not uncommon, we believe, in practice, he takes the form of a woman, instead of appearing, as Defoe has it, “in all his formalities and frightfuls.”

The Montorio of Maturin was also a boyish production, which the writer affected at a more advanced period of life to despise. Yet it appears to us to exhibit more genius, mingled, no doubt, with a deep vein of extravagance and false taste, than his more elaborate attempts to picture real manners and passions in his Woman. There was originality even in the conception, hideous as it was, of the hero employing against the brother, who had deceived him, the agency of that brother’s own sons, whom he persuades to parricide, by working on their visionary fears and by the doctrines of fatalism; and then, when the deed is done, discovering that the victims whom he had reasoned and persecuted into crime were his own children. And though Maturin’s machinery in no respect differs from that of his brethren, though he labours to explain away in the close all that had appeared supernatural in the beginning, and of course with total want of success, yet the impression left on the mind by the perusal of the work, in the three thickest volumes we believe that modern romance has to boast of, though gloomy and unsatisfactory’, is certainly that of an inventive genius in the author. Such was the effect it produced on Sir Walter Scott, who was the first to direct attention to it, by a criticism in the Quarterly Review for 1810. “We have strolled,” says he in a lively introduction, “through a variety of castles, each of which was regularly called II Castello; met with many captains of condottieri; heard various ejaculations of Santa Maria and Diabolo; read, by a decaying lamp, and in a tapestried chamber, dozens of legends as stupid as the main history; examined such suites of deserted apartments as might set up a reasonable barrack, and saw as many glimmering lights as would make a respectable illumination. Amidst these flat imitations of the Castle of Udolpho, we lighted unexpectedly upon the work which is the subject of the present article, and in defiance of the very bad taste in which it is composed, we found ourselves unusually involved in the perusal, and at times impressed with no common degree of respect for the powers of the author.”

Of the Zelucco of Dr. Moore, which appeared about 1785, we have already spoken at some length in our Biographical article.

The influence of such works as Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, written seemingly with the view of reversing Pope’s maxim, and proving that whatever is is wrong, becomes very obvious in our literature of fiction towards the close of the eighteenth century. For, in truth, such speculations, embodied in an imaginative form, were found highly congenial to that spirit of restlesness and discontent with political institutions which was every where abroad, perplexing nations with fear of change, and leading men of genius to dress up moral paradoxes in the shape of narrative, and to employ their eloquence in attacking those principles of society which tend to make men happy, or which keep them so. This tendency appears sufficiently obvious in the novels of Bage, a sceptic in religion, and a latitudinarian in morals, whose crude theories, we think, might have been allowed to repose in that oblivion to which they had been consigned, without being revived in such a work as the Novelist’s Library. Their introduction at all into a work intended to embody only the classical works of fiction, seems unaccountable; nor is the singularity diminished by the fact that his best work, Hermsprong, or Man as he is not, is omitted, while three of inferior merit are re-published.

But the social and political theories of the time found an abler exponent in Godwin, whose first work, Caleb Williams, appeared in 1794, in which, throwing aside the stimulus of the marvellous, he has trusted the effect of his tale entirely to a picture of the workings of the mind on two beings of very opposite natures, who are driven, by a species of fatal instinct, into the relative positions of persecutor and victim. The doctrines of the Political Justice furnished avowedly the primary source of the inspiration of Caleb Williams, intended, to use the words of tile preface, “to furnish a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man ;” that is to say, to shew that, under the maladministration of English law, liable to be perverted by influence and wealth, the chances are all in favour of the escape of the real criminal and the conviction of the innocent; a proposition notoriously untrue, and which is not even advocated with much art or plausibility in the series of persecutions to which Williams is exposed. Fortunately, however, for the real merit and permanent popularity of this singular work, the political design soon merges in a higher and more legitimate interest. The genius of the author kindles as he proceeds, and out of a hard and republican background brings forth the bright and chivalrous vision of the aristocratic Falkland, a being of a loving noble nature, the victim of false honour and morbid refinement of feeling. Few scenes in romance exceed in breathless and entrancing interest the description of the progress of suspicion in the mind of Williams, till he extorts from his master the fatal secret, on which hangs the whole of his future fate; the escape from prison in the grey dawn of a drizzling morning; and the last interview between Williams and his dying persecutor, sitting, corpse-like, to hear his secret disclosed to the world, and to suffer the agony of knowing that life and reputation are about to leave him together.

In none of his other works did Godwin evince the same grandeur of conception, and in none of his subsequent personations, except Bethlehem Gabor, did he exhibit that power of presenting demoniacal characters, such as Tyrrell and Gines, in a light which renders them, unnatural as they are, actual objects of terror, like a serpent in the path. The tone of his next novel, St. Leon, is altogether more subdued than that of Caleb Williams. It has a mournful eloquence in harmony with the picture of desolation which it presents. Here, too, the author has imperfectly succeeded in working out the design which he announces he had in view; namely, that of proving that the happiness of mankind would not have been augmented by tile gifts of immortal youth and inexhaustible riches; for, in order to illustrate his position, Godwin is under the necessity of laying the scene in a remote age, and making the persecutions of St. Leon arise from feelings of superstitious credulity, which we cannot help recollecting that the progress of intelligence has since exploded. The senior wrangler, who asked what Paradise Lost proved, would certainly therefore have been dissatisfied with Godwin’s demonstration; but as the vehicle of a series of most touching and impressive scenes, his plot is far from deficient in interest, nor, granting its premises, in probability. “How minute,” says an eloquent critic, “how pathetic, how tragical is the detail of the gradual ruin which falls on this weak devoted man, up to its heart-breaking consummation in the death of the noble Marguerite de Damville; how tremendous and perfect is the desolation, after voluntarily leaving his daughters, and cutting the last thread which binds him to his kind! How complete is the description of his escape from the procession of the auto da fé; of his entrance into the Jew’s house, his fears, his decaying strength, just serving to make up the life-restoring elixir, the dying taper, the insensibility, the resurrection to new life, and the day-spring of his young manhood! How shall we speak of the old man, the bequeather of the fatal legacy to St. Leon, and his fearful words: ‘Friendless, friendless! alone,
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alone! , Alas! how terrible to imagine a being in possession of such endowments, who could bring himself to think of death!—able to turn back upon his path and meet immortal youth, to see again the morning of his day, and find, in renewed life and beauty, a disguise impenetrable to his former enemies; yet, in the sadness of his experience, so dreading the mistakes and persecutions of his fellow-men, as to choose rather to lie down with the worm and seek oblivion in the seats of rottenness and corruption.”

None of Godwin’s other tales have been popular. “His man of feeling feels but for himself;” and, indeed, the character is in some points so unintelligible, and in others so odious, that notwithstanding many beauties of detail, we cannot wonder at the unpopularity of Fleetwood. The same sort of objections apply to the insane vindictiveness of Mandeville. Cloudesley, the child of Godwin’s old age, is only remarkable for the gentle beauty of the style, and the contrast which the calmness of the story (turning, like Caleb Williams, on the discovery of a murder,) presents to the rapidity and sullen energy of his first production.

No writer has come so near the manner of Godwin as Charles Brockden Brown, an American novelist, an imitator of the English author, but in a free and noble spirit of imitation. He certainly had not Godwin’s power of mental analysis, and not much of that pathetic tenderness which, contrasted with the general sternness of his tone, shews like a rainbow against a troubled sky. He was altogether more prosaic; dealing, indeed,rather with the material than the moral sublime; producing his strong effects by scenes of sickness, danger, death, or the explosions of insanity; and often making his characters mere phantasmata, which interest us only as the means by which a series of agitating incidents are brought into connexion. But he had a good deal of the same eloquence, and the same dark and mysterious power of imagination; a certain intensity of portraiture, whether of mental emotion or things external; great skill in working up a chain of singular events that keep curiosity and suspense upon the stretch, or impress us with a sense of danger and anxiety, and of which he loves to furnish an explanation from those phenomena in our nature which are little understood, such as somnambulism, trances, spontaneous combustion, or ventriloquism. In these respects Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Bluntly, and Arthur Mervyn have all nearly the same character, nor do they differ materially in point of merit. Brown has singular power in the delineation of solitude of all kinds, whether the silence of lonely forests, broken only by the howl of panthers, or of deserted mansions dropping to decay. There is one picture of this kind in Arthur Mervyn, of an empty house, evacuated during the yellow fever in Philadelphia, silent and dark in the day time, with the sunshine streaming in through the closed doors and shutters, and faintly discovering that every thing remained undisturbed since its desertion, which produces a strong feeling of awe, and oppresses the spirits with an unaccountable sadness.

No other novelist of any ability can be said to have adopted the manner of Godwin with success, except his accomplished daughter, the authoress of Frankenstein, a production of much originality in its conception, though the execution of the work is unequal, and the whole portion which relates to the self-education of the monster, who is the creation of the new Prometheus, almost ludicrously improbable.

Several female novelists, towards the close of the eighteenth century, deserve notice, whose tales, though now little read, have the merit either of pathetic or humorous delineation. In the first of these classes are Mrs. Inchbald and Charlotte Smith; in the latter Madame D’Arblay, or to use the name by which she was best known, Miss Burney.

The fame of Mrs. Inchbald rests upon her Simple Story. The title perhaps is but of doubtful application to a novel, which is really complicated with strong and varied passions, which turns on the fate and fortunes of persons plaoed in very peculiar relations to each other, and like Shakspeare’s Winters Tale, unites two distinct stories relating to different personages, between the action of which “time has slid o’er sixteen years ;” for the Perdita of Mrs. Inchbald’s second part is the daughter of that Lady Elmwood, for whose misfortunes and indiscretions our sympathies had been engaged in the first, and who, almost in a sentence, is suddenly consigned to guilt, and to the grave. Dorriforth only remains the connecting link between the two portions of the tale. It is a proof of considerable merit in the novel, that so hazardous an experiment as that of transferring our sympathies to actors in a great measure new to the scene, has not been unsuccessful; that the interest is, notwithstanding, kept up, partly by the real pathos of some of the scenes, and the natural traits of passion in others, such as that where Lord Elmwood, receiving his deserted daughter as she falls into his arms, calls her by the maiden name of her guilty mother, as if all that passed since those days of innocence had faded from his mind like a dream; and partly by the dramatic nature of the situations which, though sometimes violent, are generally picturesque and agitating, and the movement of the dialogue, which every where shows the skill of a practical writer for the stage. Her second novel, entitled Nature and Art, has been generally and justly reckoned much inferior to the Simple Story.

Charlotte Smith, (1749—1806) though her novels are extremely defective in plot, betraying marks of haste, and tinged with a melancholy easily to be accounted for from the depressing circumstances under which they were generally composed, cannot be confounded with the ordinary day-labourers for the circulating library, “who turn a Persian tale for half a crown.” Sir Walter Scott, in one of those kindly notices by which he delighted to cheer the heart of struggling genius, or to do justice to the memory of talents which time was consigning somewhat too rapidly to oblivion, has given her credit for great powers of satire mixed with pathos, and characters sketched with “firmness of pencil and liveliness of colouring.” The satire indeed seems to have been pretty indiscriminate, since it extends to her own husband, whose pecuniary improvidence and sanguine temperament are glanced at in the character of the projector, who hoped to make a fortune by manuring his estate with old wigs. But apart from satire, the Old Manor House, the only one of her novels with which we are acquainted, is really entitled to the character of an interesting and well-written tale. We have a lively recollection of the Manor House itself, its neighbourhood, its sea-side scenes, the strange domineering Lady of the Manor, Mrs. Rayland, whom Sir Walter Scott describes as a sort of Queen Elizabeth in private life, and the natural interest which she has succeeded in giving to the love story which is going on within the ancient walls.

The popularity once enjoyed by the novels of Miss Burney, appears now to have been somewhat overrated, at least we are at a loss to discover any thing in her first work, Evelina, except the extreme youth of the writer, then only eighteen, to account for that burst of approbation with which it appears to have been received in 1778 by such men as Burke, Reynolds, and Johnson. She wrote no doubt with sprightliness, with some humour of a broad and superficial kind, and undoubtedly possessed considerable talent in drawing bores and personages of low manners or odd habits from vulgar middle life; in imagining scenes of awkward mistakes in society, and exaggerating the teasing distresses thence arising to her heroines and other personages of more refined manners or higher pretensions. Indeed, to mimickry she appears, from her father’s account, to have had a strong leaning from her childhood; but when she rises from mere manners and habits to paint feelings, we see little but indecision on one hand, or exaggeration on the other. With[7:19:347]in the field where she excels too, she is much of a mannerist; the same characters under other names, the same incidents under a thin disguise, re-appear in Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla. Even the graces of style which she had shewn in her earlier works, in a great measure forsook her in her last novel, the Wanderer; a tissue of improbable distresses and silly refinements of sensibility, conveyed in language which is neither good English nor good sense.

The Canterbury Tales deserve notice on account of the interesting and highly original story of Kruitzner, or the German’s Tale, by Harriet Lee, on which Lord Byron founded his Werner. The tales contributed to the work by her sister Sophia, such as the Two Emilys, and the Clergyman’s Tale, though less striking, are written with genuine feeling and tenderness.

It may be observed, however, in those female novelists to whom we have last adverted that, though the marvellous is thrown aside, and the characters are taken from common life, the sentiments and tone of feeling are yet decidedly strained beyond the natural pitch. The characters display a degree of romantic affection and a prodigal expenditure of sensibility for which the cares and distractions of real life, we fear, afford but little leisure. It remained for Miss Austin (1775-1817,) to shew what a charm might be imparted to truthful pictures of life, as we really see it around us in the quiet monotony of domestic arrangements, with its interchanges of poetry and prose, business and strong feeling, and dialogues at balls and parties alternating with the secret griefs of the heart; just such a picture, in short, as Asmodeus would present, could he remove the roof of many an English home, and place us beside the hearths of the Knightleys, Bennets, Woodhouses, and Bertrams by whom they are inhabited. No species of novel writing exposes itself to a severer trial, since it not only resigns all Bayes , pretensions “to elevate the imagination and bring you off in some extraordinary way,” but by professing to give us pictures of our ordinary acquaintances, in their common garb, places its productions within that range of criticism, where all are equally judges, and where Crispin is entitled to dictate to Apelles. And yet with such fine perception and perfect truth of keeping has Miss Austin performed her task, that we never miss in her novels the excitement of uncommon events, and rarely feel her simple annals of English life to be tedious or unworthy of the dignity of fiction. In reading them, we have the feeling of being actually in company with α group of highly respectable persons, of no remarkable ability, though with good sense and a fair proportion of right feeling; with a sprinkling of fools, oddities, and village gossips; and the conversation, the little incidents, and displays of temper, and sallies of good humour or bad, and small plottings and counter-plottings among the guests, are exactly such as any contemplative Jaquez who should establish himself in an English country house or rectory for a fortnight, and watch the bye play of the society about him, might set down in his note book; only skilfully selected and arranged, the superfluities lopped off, the dullness thrown into the background, and the whole wrought up into a picture, painted indeed in sober hues, but with unequalled delicacy of touch, and an all-pervading harmony.

All the novels of Miss Austin closely resemble each other; but Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility, are of a more puerile cast than the others, and betray a more unformed taste. Pride and Prejudice, particularly in the characters of the Bennets, was an improvement on the two former, but Emma, Mansfield Park ,and Persuasion are justly regarded as her most finished works. Some scenes in Persuasion, the last work of this gifted authoress, have always appeared to us models of unobtrusive tenderness.

Some one has described the novels of Miss Edgeworth as a sort of essence of common sense; and the definition is not inappropriate, for she is the most anti-sentimental of novelists. The sway of the stronger passions she has almost excluded from her Tales. Love is indeed tile only one which has found entrance, and to qualify him for admission, his wings have been sorely clipped and trimmed, and reason constantly placed as a gentleman usher over him. Miss Edgeworth has even less toleration for splendid faults or bursts of enthusiasm than Miss Austin. Her chief aim is to rebuke folly, by ridicule and comic humour; to unteach bad habits of mind, to substitute in their stead prudence, firmness, temper, perseverance, and habits of absolute truth, a process which she generally represents as effected by a gradual series of efforts and consequent ameliorations, which are within the power of all minds of ordinary resolution. Her favourite characters are either persons of well-balanced minds, with sound heads and a smattering of physical science, who act rightly and honourably,but always think twice before they act, and weigh in the scales of utility what are generally considered as matters of feeling, like the Percys: or they are personages who, spoiled by indolence and bad education, succeed by a course of self-discipline, in curing their intellectual or moral maladies, and becoming useful and honourable members of society, like the hero of Ennui, Lord Glenthorn. Miss Edgeworth brings to her task the results of much observation of character, particularly that of her countrymen; a quick perception of the humourous, a dramatic liveliness of dialogue, a high sense of all that is honourable and decorous, with a scorn of meanness and evasion, and that tone of good society, which her pictures, often drawn from fashionable life, demand. If her novels are at times too obviously monitory and didactic, and the ferule peeps out rather alarmingly behind the schooloustress, this defect, we fear, is in a great measure inseparable from the very qualities which constitute the strength of her mind, and from the conception she had formed for herself of the ideal of novel writing.

It is singular that a novelist of this rationalizing spirit, and so intolerant of all moral marvels, should have so frequently admitted great improbabilities into her plots, where the catastrophe is often brought about either by some one very unlikely event, or by a concurrence of events, and fortunate accidents, the combination of which render the circumstance at the least passing strange. Miss Edgeworth is also fond of making the discovery of important events turn on little trifles of circumstantial evidence, which are too artificially prepared, and after all are not satisfactory.

The impression, however, which the perusal of her best novels, such as Ennui and the Absentee, leaves on the mind, is that of high respect for the sagacity, grasp of mind and rectitude of judgment of the author, whose {lower of dramatizing a moral lesson has not often been excelled. And it is gratifying to see that, in the last work of Miss Edge-worth, Helen, there appears no diminution of her powers. In wit it is equal to any of her former novels; in pathetic scenes, superior to most of them.

At the period when Sir Walter Scott (1814), produced the first of that long file of romances which have since obtained a more than European reputation, the public taste, in regard to novel writing, seemed to have sunk to a low ebb. Miss Edgeworth indeed was popular; for the wit and good sense of her dialogue, and her happy pictures of Irish character, found favour in the sight even of the readers of circulating libraries; but the merits of Miss Austin’s more unobtrusive pictures of life were comparatively unknown. At best she was confounded with the writers of Winters in London, or Winters in Paris, and shared a dubious favour with the romantic effusions of Francis Lathom and the other labourers of the Minerva press, so called, we presume, upon the lucas a non lucendo principle, from the goddess of wisdom having so little to do with its productions. Translations, too, from Augustus La Fontaine’s homely but rather vulgar pictures of'little German Krah-winkel towns, or the broad and indecent extravagances of Pigault le Brun,
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tended still further to degrade and vulgarize the public taste. Every thing in fiction, in short, looked unpromising and exhausted. The appearance of a great writer, who should strike out a new path through this much trodden waste, seemed at that moment in the highest degree improbable. And yet this was at once effected by the Author of Waverley, in such a manner as to raise the romance from the lowest level to the very highest position in literature.

Nothing, we believe, could be more irksome or more useless than to enter on any formal criticism of the romances of Scott; and it may well be doubted whether the present generation be in a condition to judge of his merits with perfect impartiality, or to determine his precise rank as a writer of fiction. We at least shall not allow ourselves to be seduced into such a disquisition, but shall confine our observations to a few points on which we think it hardly probable that posterity will reverse the concurrent judgment of the present day.

The resemblance of Scott’s mind to that of Shakspeare has been often remarked, and with some justice; for though even the most enthusiastic admirers of the romance writer, will hardly venture to claim for him an equality of powers with Shakspeare, there were strong kindred features in the character of their minds. In both we are struck with the same general and almost universal sympathies, leading to impartial and kindly views of all men and all opinions, the most remote from their own; a cheerful, healthful tone of feling, which brightens existence about us, instead of dwelling on its evils; an avoidance of all moral casuistry, or treading on the borders of the forbidden, either in the creation of characters or of incidents; the feeling of the humourous as strongly developed as the sensibilities or the imagination; great self-possession, and a noiseless exertion of power, working out its end, not by sudden bursts, or high-wrought passages, but by a silent and steady progression, like the dawn brightening into the fulness of day.

The works of Scott produce their effect rather by the combination of many qualities than the predominance of any. In depth of feeling, we think he yields to the author of Anastasias; in invention of incident, and disposition of plot, he is equalled by many; his humour will hardly bear a comparison with that of Sterne, or the best parts of Fielding; and in the direct and forcible expression of the stronger passions, we should be inclined to give the preference both to Godwin and the author of Valentis. But his strength lies in the possession and harmonious adjustment of most of the qualities requisite to the novelist, none engrossing the whole mind, none excluding another, but all working together in kindly unison: learning arrayed in the most picturesque combinations; observation of fife embodied not in abstractions, but in living forms; humour springing out of tenderness, like smiles struggling through tears; the spirit of ancient knighthood leavening the worldly wisdom of modern times; and the imagination of the poet adorning, without impairing the common sympathies and good-humoured sagacity of the man.

the department in which this combination of qualities has been most successfully displayed by Scott, was that of the historical romance,—a class of fictions which he may truly be said to have created. For although fictions bearing the title of historical romances, were by no means uncommon in English literature before the time of Scott, such as the Recess of Miss Lee, or the Scottish Chiefs of Miss Porter, it is apparent that they stand in a totally different class; not being, in fact, historical, except in the names of the characters. Obvious as the idea now appears, Scott was in truth, the first to show how much invention might gain by a union with reality; what additional probability, interest, and importance might be given to the fortunes of imaginary heroes, by interweaving their destinies with those of historical personages; nay, how much of romance in its finest forms lies in the characters and events of history itself invisible to the prosaic or merely philosophic observer, but obvious at once to the eye of imagination. He has carried the picturesque of history to its perfection; for without imparting to his portraits the deep and subtle traits by which Shakspeare so wonderfully individualizes the beings of his dramas, he never fails at least to present consistent and striking pictures of his historical personages in their habit as they lived, and to dispose the light and shadow about them with the most felicitous adjustment,—dress, look, gestures, manner, and the outward accompaniments of scenery, being all made important accessories, to heighten the effect of well-known peculiarities, or to hide the want of those over which Time has dropped a veil, which even Imagination can hardly raise.

In description, indeed, generally, Sir Walter Scott was unrivalled. Whatever he sees with the eye of the mind, shapes itself into words which enable us to see it too. His pictures combine in a singular way breadth and minuteness; for while he painted the details with sharpness and firmness, no one understood better the art of arrangement in masses; so that he never fails to give the spirit as well as the form of the spot, making us feel the solemnity and gloom of castles and druidical forests, the calm produced by the still beauty of a Highland lake, from which the morning mist is disappearing, or the healthy elevation of spirits with which we travel up some mountain height, whence we see far into the country beyond, and “feel the breath of heaven fresh blowing.”

We offer no remarks upon his characters, except this, that making every allowance for repetitions, no writer of fiction since Shakespeare has enriched the portrait gallery of invention with more originals, of which we have a distinct conception; and that though his female characters have less variety and less truth than his male personages, we know no writer except Shakspeare to whom tile same remark may not justly be applied.

The plots of Scott, speaking generally, are neither remarkable for excellence, nor the reverse. Examples may, in fact, be found, in the long list of his romances, both of skilful and defective plots. Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and the Bride of Lamermoor, for instance, are proofs how artfully he could at times arrange his plan; the two latter having all the compactness and steady progression of tile drama. Others, again, such as The Monastery, St. Ronan’s Well, and Rob Roy, axe in a high degree loose and inconsequential.

Fertile and inventive as was the genius of Scott, it cannot, we think, be denied, that during the latter half of his career as a writer of fiction, he appeared to less advantage. No wonder, indeed, when, in addition to tile limits by which all invention is bounded, we consider under what depressing circumstances many of his later works were composed, that in these even the elasticity of genius itself should be somewhat outworn and deadened; that the conventional, both in character and incident, should occasionally supply the place of invention; and that mere imagery, and not always very appropriate illustration, should be substituted for the natural turns which at first enlivened the dialogue. “If there be a mental drudgery,” to use his own words in his notice of Charlotte Smith, “which lowers the spirits and lacerates the nerves like the toil of the slave, it is that which is exacted by literary composition, when the heart is not in unison with the work on which the head is employed.” When he breaks up new ground, as in Nigel, Quentin Duneard, and The Crusaders, his genius indeed suffers little diminution; but in Redgauntlet, Anne of Gierstein, and The Betrothed, the practised skill of the mechanist, recomposing old materials in new shapes, is far more visible than the freshness and spontaniety of an original inspiration. With the publication of Kenilworth, indeed, the sun of his fame may be said to have “touched the highest point of all its great[7:19:349]ness ;” but like that luminary during a polar summer, it seemed for a time rather to revolve than to descend, and its rays continued to look bright and beautiful, long after it was journeying towards the west.

No writer ever exercised so great an influence over the public mind, or led to so much conscious or unconscious imitation. His influence on Italy, France, and Germany, we shall afterwards have occasion to notice. On the literature of Great Britain, we believe it to have exerted on the whole a most beneficial effect; not, indeed, that any professed imitation of his manner has yet appeared, which possesses great claims to genius, but that he has carried a higher spirit into novel writing; taught us how the simple feelings of peasants, and the homely pathos of humble life, and the re-entings of feeling amongst the outcasts of society, might be made to blend with scenes of high imagination; that his writings are calculated to strengthen the ties of our common humanity; that they never tend to foster a bad, or to throw ridicule upon a good or generous feeling; while, speaking of them in a merely literary point of view, they taught lessons of simplicity, good taste, moderation, and skill in seizing the best points both of character and description, which have not been without their effect even on those by whom the mere manner of Scott, or his choice of subjects, have been studiously avoided.

The professed imitators of Scott have been numerous, but not successful. As usual, they have magnified his defects, urging his conventional personages, such as dwarfs, fools, gypsies, and bores, into caricature; multiplying instead of retrenching those similes which, even in the original, were so obtrusively frequent, as to remind us of Bayes’ rule for writing dialogue, “ever make a simile when you are surprised ;” and overlaying the plot with minute descriptions of dress and scenery, which the reader, after a little experience, is wise enough to avoid. In reading them we are constantly reminded of Boileau’s description of a tedious poetical landscape painter:
S'il rencontre un palais il m'en décrit la face
Il me promene apres de terrasse en terrasse,
Je saute vingt feuillets pour en trouver la fin,
Et je me sauve a peine au travers du jardin.

The best imitation of Sir Walter Scott’s manner with which we are acquainted is the anonymous romance of Forman, of which he speaks with respect in his criticism on Mrs. Radcliffe. The romances of Mr. James, too, though not indicating much depth, are pleasing, always written with good feeling, and with a plot which excites a sort of quiet interest, if it does not keep the mind in the chain of curiosity or suspense. The novels of Cooper, who is probably better known than any other of the imitators of Scott, seem to be considerably overrated. On shipboard, or on an Indian heath, he is striking and picturesque; but among civilized society, and, above all, in his attempts to catch the ease of fashion, we must regard him as singularly unsuccessful.

A strange contrast to the spirit of Scott’s novels was exhibited in the sceptical and dreary tone of Anastasius. Without force of character-painting, with much languor in parts, and too prolonged a detail of heartlessness and villany, the work fascinates by its strength, and towards the close, when the character of the hero deepens, by its irresistible pathos. Commencing with the levity of a Greek Gil Blas, it modulates into a key of sadness and desolation of spirit, which reminds us of the close of St. Leon. Fiction has few pictures which will bear comparison with that of Anastasias, sitting on the steps of the lazaretto of Trieste, with his dying boy in his arms; and the whole conclusion of the romance, the sudden meeting and silent parting with Spiridion, the journey towards the north, the dream, the warning voice, which, in the dusky light of daybreak, tells him he has not far to go; the hopelessness, the resignation of his death, all leave on the mind that profound impression of the mutability and nothingness of existence, which Wordsworth has described:
So fades, so languishes, grows dim and dies,
All that this world is proud of. From their spheres
The stars of human glory are cast down,
Perish the roses and the flowers of kings.

It is not our intention to pursue this sketch through the works of our living ornaments of the literature of fiction, or of some who have recently been taken from amongst us. We shall merely notice, that among those who have struck out an independent path for themselves, are the author of Valerius and Adam Blair, works of conspicuous originality, particularly the first, in which the difficult task of imparting a deep interest to a classical subject is performed with complete success; the author of the Trials of Margaret Lindsay, and the Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, who, with the finest feeling of the dignity and poetry which lie within the humble rural life of Scotland, has performed for its more pathetic and elevated aspect, what Galt, in his Annals of the Parish, and his other tales, has done for its humours and its vulgarities; the authoress of Marriage, the Inheritance, and Destiny, and Sir E. L. Bulwer, who has given proof of very versatile ability, in a series of romances widely differing in character, from the levity of Pelham down to the earnestness of Maltravers, but the best of which we think his more matured taste and judgment may yet surpass.

No country has produced more novelists than Italy; but the Italian novel bears little analogy to what we understand by the term. Their novels were, in fact, originally prose versions of the same short tales, sometimes heroic, but more frequently turning on themes of gallantry or comic adventure, which formed the favourite subjects of the Trouveres. They were Fabliaux translated into Italian; and this character they retained for five centuries from Boccaccio to Gozzi. (1313—1786.) The incidents are generally briefly given; there is little development of character or sentiment; or, where these are found, they exhibit rather separate scenes from life than any thing having the interest of a compact whole. But if the incidents and characters have little development, the Italian novelists have indemnified themselves for this confinement, by indulging in the utmost license of a pompous, circuitous, and unmeaning style. The facile beauty of the Italian language, “Che spande di parlar si largo frame,”has been the bane of their novelists. Boccaccio, the first and by far the greatest of the Italian novelists, indeed manages to impart to it a sort of garrulous grace; but in the hands of his imitators the contrast between the poverty of the idea and the rich garb of words with which it is invested, assumes a ludicrous effect.

Never, perhaps, among so many novelists, was there so little of novelty. Instead of imitating nature, their avowed principle was to imitate Boccaccio, who, imparting to every thing a soft and rose-coloured glow, was himself not remarkable for the closeness of his adherence to it. And hence regarding the novel merely as a theme upon which they were to display all the brilliant variations of which the music of Italian speech was susceptible, they were contented to repeat in a great measure the same themes, to borrow, with a sort of easy impudence, their incidents from Boccaccio or from each other; and more anxious for the purity of their Tuscan than of their tales, of which by far the greater number turn on scenes of licentiousness or low humour, they seemed to think all other merits in the novel subordinate to that of being “written in very choice Italian.”

Beyond the limits of Italy, Bandello (1554) and Cintio (whose Hecatommithi appeared in 1565,) are almost the only novelists whose names are known to foreigners, if we except the Belphegar of the versatile Macchiavelli; and [7:19:350]the chief interest connected with these novelists consists 'in the hints or materials furnished by them to Shakspeare, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and our dramatic writers of the time of Elizabeth and James, to whom indeed these works, particularly those of Bandello, afforded a perfect storehouse for plots. Among the nine volumes of Bandello’s works contained in the Novelliero, some interesting and a few pathetic tales may be pointed out; but Cintio’s can have no interest in themselves except for those who love to sup full of horrors; for he was one of those wholesale dealers in the terrible, who thought that poetical effect was to be produced by a vigorous operation on the nerves rather than the feelings, and therefore piqued himself, like the schoolmaster in Gil Blas, on massacring all the personages of his tragedies, even to the prompter.

Towards the close of the last century, a taste for novels in a style somewhat resembling our own, appears to have gained ground, and several tales of a melancholy kind made their appearance. With these we do not profess to be acquainted; nor has any one which appeared prior to the Promessi Sposi of Manzoni, attained the least reputation beyond Italy, with the exception of the Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, an early production of Ugo Foscolo, (1802); and the result partly of a melancholy event occurring in his own family, and partly of the study of Goethe’s Werther, by which the enthusiastic mind of Foscolo appears to have been very powerfully affected. Like Werther, it is a story of love and suicide, full of fervour, violence, and, to speak the truth, of absurdity; yet delivered with a species of eloquence, and a certain appearance of conviction, which, so far at least as regarded the expression of mental discomfort, and the misery arising from a total want of all fixed opinion, was perhaps sufficiently real. To the Italians, who knew little or nothing of Goethe, this stormy effervescence of an impassioned temperament, and all this eloquent “questioning of fate,” possessed even an air of originality; and being the first successful attempt to introduce the sentimental romance of the school of Rousseau and Goethe into Italy, it naturally awakened a degree of enthusiasm which now appears somewhat disproportioned to its real merit.

The Promessi Sposi of Manzoni certainly approaches much more nearly to the idea of a good romance than any thing which Italy has yet produced; but, after all, it too is essentially an imitation. If we had had no Scott, we should have had no Manzoni. The idea of illustrating a subject connected with the Italian history of the commencement of the seventeenth century; the introduction of historical characters, such as that of Cardinal Borromeo, who is the deus ex machina of the piece; the antiquarian lore displayed in the way in which the bread-riot in Milan (a close parallel to the insurrection of the Liegeois in Quentin Durward), is wrought up; the account of the plague in the Milanese, in which Manzoni has tried to imitate at once Boccacio and Scott,—all concur to satisfy us, that Manzoni, though an able lyric poet, has no great share of original invention, and that though he can make a good use of materials furnished by others, he is one of those literary commercialists who require to borrow the main portion of the capital with which they are to trade. We are far, however, from denying the real merits of this performance of Manzoni, in which the characters of Cardinal Borromeo, and the peasant hero and heroine, Renzo and Lucia, are naturally and pleasingly drawn, and in which some of the scenes, such as the opening scene at Don Abbondio’s house, the riot in Milan, the interview between the unknown and the Cardinal, and some of the incidents and descriptions connected with the plague, are of vivid interest.

Since the appearance of the romance of Manzoni, who has lately abandoned both fiction and poetry for religion, many attempts have been made by Rosini, D’Azeglio, Guerazzi, Tommaseo, Belmonte, and others, to transfer the historical romance to an Italian soil, and to give a romantic interest to the delineation of the Italian feudal history of the middle ages, or of periods somewhat later. The first, and we believe the best, of these appears to be the Monaca de Monza of Rosini, who has founded his story on an episode in the Promessi Sposi. Were we to form a judgment from a few of these attempts which we have read, as to the merits of those of which we remain ignorant, we should be inclined to say generally, that nothing is more remarkable than the total want of interest which Italian subjects possess in Italian hands; a result which appears the more singular, since at one time it was only necessary in our English romances to transfer the scene to Italy, to enlist at once our warmest sympathies in favour of the story. Now-a-days, we think, when the subject is almost entirely in the hands of native novel-writers, the very idea of embarking on an Italian story of the middle ages, seems to act upon the fancy as the most powerful refrigerative. Strangely enough, too, it is to be observed, that the Italian novelists of modern times never appear to greater advantage than in the description of the most furious battles, carried on with all the determination and bloody-mindedness of an Esplandian or a Bobadil, as in Ettore Heramosea, by Massimo D’Azeglio, a son-in-law of Manzoni, L'Assediο di Firenze, by Gualandi; an expenditure of valour on paper which we fear is scarcely justified by the fact, since, if we are to give credit to the accounts of Guacciardini, many of their most doughty encounters were as harmless in their results as the protracted passage of arms between Gymnast and Tripet, in Rabelais, as to which uncle Toby, after listening to an endless detail of the various complicated manoeuvres, declared, that one home-thrust of the bayonet would have been worth them all.

In Spain, which, though not the birth-place, had certainly become by adoption pre-eminently the country of the chivalrous romance, and where, perhaps, its extravagances had been less redeemed by talent than any where else, it is well known that a revolution in taste was effected by the inimitable satire of Cervantes, (1547-1616), which Montesquieu, with amusing extravagance, describes as the single admirable book in the Spanish language which shews the absurdity of all the rest. So effectually, indeed, did that work (published in 1605) attain its end, or rather one of its ends, that after its appearance no romance of chivalry appeared in Spain, and the old ones so entirely ceased to be printed, that it is with difficulty that copies of them are now to be obtained. The “ultimus Romanorum,” the last adherent of the good old romance, was Don Juan de Silva y Toledo, who published his Don Policisne de Boecia in 1602, three years before the appearance of the Don Quixote.

But, had that book been solely devoted to the object of exploding the old romances of chivalry, it would probably have shortly been forgotten with the extravagances it exposed. The charm which has given a perennial life and continued popularity to Don Quixote, is the deeper idea which it contains of illustrating, in comic colours, the contest between imagination and reality; the danger, both to its possessor and to others, of all misdirected enthusiasm, whether it take the direction of reviving an extinct age of chivalry, or any other course plainly running counter to the current of society all around it, by means of which a constant collision is produced, in which, whatever becomes of the world, the visionary himself is sure to be the sufferer. For the fuller development of this idea, he has placed beside the knight, who represents the imagination without the common sense, a squire who is the type of the vulgar common sense without the imagination. Between these children of his brain, he parcels out the treasures of his mind, bequeathing to the knight his own high spirit and courage, his learning, his generosity, and his love of truth;
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and to the squire the solid riches of his good sense, and his peculiar humour; that humour, which, as it exists in Cervantes, is among the rarest of human qualities,—the very poetry of the comic, founded on tender sympathy with all forms of existence, though displaying itself in sportive reflection; and issuing not in superficial laughter, but in still smiles, the source of which lies far deeper.

The characters and fortunes of these contrasted companions he has linked together in such a way, as to impress on the mind the feeling, how indispensable each is to each, as the complement of the other,—the learning, high-mindedness, and strong imagination of the knight as the creative and moving power in human life; the practical good sense, and even selfishness, of the squire as the controlling force; from the judicious union of which opposites arises the harmony, and from their separation the discords of society. He paints also, with great knowledge of human life, the effect which these reciprocal influences, constantly exerted on each other through vicinity and a common pursuit, have in modifying even the original character itself, and gradually making the enthusiast more rational, and the common-place man of the world more imaginative. The sound philosophy, the impartial and kindly spirit with which Cervantes has wrought out this conception, in whichjustice is done at once to the higher and the more common elements of our nature; the flood of humour with which he surrounded it,—which has tempted many a one since the days of Philip IV. to imitate the pantomime of the student on the banks of the Manzanares,—are as obvious to the least refined of readers, as they are models of art worthy of the admiration and profound study of every writer of fiction. Like human life itself, the story unites and harmonizes the opposite extremes of the pathetic and the ludicrous, the vulgar and the elevated,—for from the midst of the comic ground-work, the striking scenes in the Sierra Morena, the episode of Cardenio and Dorothea, the story of the captive, the sweet pastoral of Marcelia, the marriage of Camacho, and many other passages, rise up, rich in pathos, grandeur, or imagination; so that, in fact, there is no work in which, while the aim at first might appear to be to destroy the romance of life, passages of more purely romantic beauty are to be found. The truth is, that Cervantes, though anxious to explode avicious tastein literature, was far enough from wishing to direct his satire against the creations of high imagination, or against the spirit of chivalry. The admiration he expressed for Amadis and Palmerin shews, that he was not insensible to the beauties by which even this branch of literature was occasionally redeemed. His own adventurous career of glory and misfortune had, no doubt, deeply impressed upon his mind the contrast between the dreams of imagination and the realities of life; he saw the poetical capabilities which such a contrast afforded,—and he has painted them with an unshrinking, and some may think a merciless hand. But, even beneath the veil of ridicule with which he has invested his crazed and battered hero, we perceive his own unextinguishable love of the exalted principles by which he is actuated; and the abiding impression which remains with us after the comic effect of the romance has passed away, is, that truth and nobleness of character will continue to command our love and veneration, though displayed in actions with which the world cannot sympathize, and placing their possessor in situations which excite our ridicule, even while his motives attract our admiration.

Cervantes seems to have intended his moral novels, (Novelas Exemplares), to be to Spain what the short tales of Boccaccio and his followers had been to Italy, only with the advantage of a purer morality. They are unequal; some being mere satirical trifles, such as the Licentiadο Vidriera; others, like the Jealous Estremaduran, (which English readers will recognize in the common farce of the Padlock), the Gipsy, and the Spanish English Lady, highly interesting in themselves, and characteristic of Spanish manners, laying open to us, as Sismondi says, the hearts and houses of its inhabitants. One novel, the Tiaflngida, (Pretended Aunt,) though undoubtedly written by Cervantes, was not included in the original collection, probably from the disagreeable nature of the subject.

The remaining work of fiction by Cervantes, the Persi-les and Sigisrnunda, is only remarkable as the last work which he wrote, and as being quite as absurd and extravagant as any of those romances of chivalry against which his powerful satire had been directed. No work has occasioned agreater division of opinion. While someof the Spanish critics speak of it in terms of extravagant praise, it is described by Viardot, a French critic, as “a tissue of episodes interlaced with each other, like those of one of Calderon’s intrigues, consisting of extravagant adventures, silly rencontres, astounding prodigies, preposterous characters, and extravagant sentiments.” It retains little or nothing, indeed, of Cervantes, but the charm of his style. Yet, like Corneille placing his Nicoede before the Cid, or Milton his Paradise Regained before his Paradise Lost, Cervantes seems to have given the preference to this child of his old age over the master-piece of his manhood.

The fashion of short novels in the Italian taste, which had been introduced by Cervantes, was followed by Lope, Canizares, Zayas, Montalvan, and by a host of imitators, whose very names the Spanish critic Lampillas declares that he is unable to enumerate. The loss of the catalogue is little to be regretted; for even among the names which are known, it would be difficult to point out one, even including the great Lope, which rises above mediocrity. Nature, indeed, seems to have given Cervantes his revenge, for the triumph of his rival in the drama, by the failure of Lope as a novelist,—for in this department, the talent and rich invention which he displayed on the stage appeared in a great measure to desert him. The best of his novels is the Fortunas de Diana, (Fortunes of Diana), first printed in the Filoména in 1621; next to which we should place his El Zeloso hasta Morir, (Jealousy till death); but truth to say, neither are remarkable. Indeed, if we except Cervantes, the same remark which we have ventured to make on Lope is generally applicable to the Spanish novelists. Nearly in proportion to the success of the nation in the creation of an original drama, is its signal deficiency in original contributions to the literature of romance. It is not often, indeed, as Tieck remarks in his preface to Bulow’s Novellenbuch, ^[20. Das Novellenbuch, Oder hundert Novellen naeh alten Italienischen, Spanischen, Franzosichen, Lateinischen, Englischen, und Deut-schen, bearbeitet von Eduard von Bulow. Leipzig, 1834. An excellent anthology , from the shorter literature of romance in the above languages; and not a mere translation, but in many cases a dexterous rificeiamer∣to, true to the spirit, while avoiding the dullness or indecency of the original. ] that the dramatic and novellistic power are found combined in a national literature to the same extent as in England.

In fact, the only species of prose fiction, with the exception of Don Quixote, in which the Spaniards have displayed any thing like original invention, is in the novels written in what is called the Gusto Picaresco, or the romances of roguery, of which the first example of any merit, and, with one exception, the best of the whole series, was furnished by the Lazaro de Tarmes of the celebrated Don Diego de Mendoza, and is said to have been written by him while a student at Salamanca, and first printed in 1553. It is rather singular, no doubt, to find a man of rank devoting himself to these pictures of want and miserable knavery, or a nation affecting so much external pomp and ceremony relishing these exposures of the real filth, meanness, or starvation which often lurked under the cloak of the whiskered Knight of Calatrava. But the Spanish character is distin [7:19:352]guished by a very peculiar vein of dry humour intermingled with a tinge of orientalism in their notions of birth and pride of ancestry and personal dignity, and hence the Spanish novelists seem to have been perfectly alive to the ridiculous features of their countrymen, while sharing very probably in the same exaggerated pretensions themselves. Accordingly, alongwith the adventures of rogues, and beggars, and gipsies, who, during the reigns of the Austrian Philips, appear to have literally swarmed in Madrid, are interspersed ample illustrations of this union of poverty and pride, and the stratagems with which many a pompous cavalier, walking the streets, as Lazaro says, like the Duke of Arcos, is occupied at home in order “to procure a crust of dry bread, and having eat it, to appear with due decorum in public, by the art of fitting on a ruffle so as to suggest the idea of a shirt, and adjusting a cloak in such a manner as to make it be believed there are clothes under it.” ^[21. Dunlop’s History of Fiction, vol. iii. p. 119. ] Mendoza’s novel contains a sketch of one of these shirtless and famished hidalgos eagerly devouring some crusts which Lazaro had begged in the morning, on pretence of trying whether the bread was sufficiently wholesome, which gives an image of starvation, in which the painful is strangely blended with a sort of sombre gaiety.

Equal, if not superior to Mendoza’s romance, is the Gusman d‘Alfarache of Matteo Aleman (1599,) which, though dealing in the same gloomy pictures of want and misery, has more variety in its pictures, and a more severe and caustic character in its sarcasm. It has been erroneously supposed to have furnished many particulars to Gil Blas; in fact, it would be difficult to point out one, except the incident of the parasite who obtains a supper at the expense of the eighth wonder of the world. In the same taste is the Gran Tacano of Quevedo.

The merit of having supplied Le Sage with much of his materials, may be more plausibly claimed by Vicente Espine), the author of the Vida del Escudero Marcos de Obregon, printed in 1618. Indeed, while the superior grace, spirit, and gay philosophy of Le Sage are apparent, it is impossible not to make a considerable deduction from his mere invention after reading the work of Espinel. The prologue, the adventure of the parasite, the dispersion of the company at Cacabelos by the muleteer, the adventure of the robber’s cave, the surprise by the corsairs, the contributions levied by those pious hermits, Don Raphael and Ambrose de Lamela, the service with the Duke of Lerma, and many of the other incidents, have nearly an exact parallel in the ruder and drier work of Espinel. Even some of the witty points, which we might be disposed at first sight to believe were Le Sage’s, turn out to be the property of the Spanish chaplain; such as Don Matthias de Silva’s reply, when asked to fight a duel early in the morning, that he never rose before one, even for a party of pleasure, and could not be expected to rise at six to have his throat cut.

This much, however, must be said for Le Sage, that he shows no desire to conceal the source of his obligations, for one of his characters is termed Marcos Obregon, and the Sangrado of his novel is, undisguisedly, the Sagredo of Espinel. Le Sage, however, knew that after every deduction was made on the score of invention, the merit of his novel would remain much the same. He threw lightness and sunshine into the mean and gloomy pictures of the Spaniards, taking care to efface the recollections of folly and knavery in his adventurers, by a cheerful and respectable termination of their career; and though the graduation of the fool into the knave, and the knave into the honest man, upon a mere principle of utility, be not perhaps in itself a very lofty moral, it is at all events far more agreeable than that of the Spanish novelists, where the rogue continues such to the last, and his only advancement is to a higher degree in the curriculum of knavery. A romance of a more pleasing and political cast than these tales of knavery, was the historical romance, the Civil Wars of Granada, by Gines Perez de la Hita, printed in 1604, turning on the dissensions of the Zegris and Abencerrages during the reign of Boabdil, and giving occasion, as might be expected, to many fine descriptions of tournaments, feasts of canes, Moorish palaces and gardens, and the contrast between the Christian and the Moorish chivalry. From this romance Florian has mainly borrowed the idea and materials of his Gonsalvo of Cordova.

One other work offiction deserving notice, though partak-ingmore of the nature of the satire than the novel, is the Fray Gerundio (Friar Gerund) of the Jesuit de l’Isla,—a severe, but rather tedious satire upon the absurdities and bad taste of the popular preachers of the time. In romantic literature the Spaniards at the present day seem to be entirely deficient. Translations of the popular French and English novels abound, but native talent or invention appear to be at an end.

In France the pastoral romances of D’Urfé and his imitators, and the heroic romances of Gomberville, Scudery, and Calprenede, whose object was “peindre Caton galant et Brutus dameret,” were succeeded by an inundation of conies des fees and voyages imaginaires, appearing about the close of the seventeenth and the commencement of the eighteenth century. This species of nursery literature, which, like the character of the fair Arricidia in Clelia, was “furieusement extraordinaire et terriblement merveilleux,” seemed peculiarly well suited to the frivolous tastes which then pervaded French society; and its temporary attraction was perhaps based in some degree upon the very want of reason and common sense, which rendered its permanent popularity impossible. When the sage Oglou in Voltaire asked the sultanas “comment preferez vous des contes que sont sans raison et que ne signifient rien,” the answer of the sultanas was, “c’est précisément pour cela que nous les aimons.”

The chief writers in this school of fiction, with whose compositions most of us have in our early days been rendered familiar, through the little gilded volumes of Mr. Newberry or his successors, were Perrault, the Countess D’Aulnoy, Madame Murat, and Mademoiselle de laForce,of whom Perrault isde-cidedly the best, his tales being distinguished by a simplicity and naivete of style indispensable in this style of writing, and in which the productions of the ladies are deficient. No great share of original invention is displayed by any of them. The chief storehouse from which they drew was the Notti Pia-cevoli of the Italian novelist Straparola, and the very remarkable Neapolitan collection by Giambattista Basile, entitled the Pentamerone, of which the first edition appeared in 1637.

A sightly different direction was given to this taste for marvels by the translation into French of daaArabimNights by Galland, and of the Persian Tales by Petit de la Croix and Le Sage, which led to a host of oriental imitations. And the childishness and absurdity of the whole of this department of literature was exposed with great wit and liveliness by Count Antony Hamilton, in his Fleur <l’Epine, and in his unfinished tale of the Four Facardins.

But this same period was distinguished by the produc- ∖ tions of some writers of a higher order: Marivaux, (1688— 1763), Prevot, (1697—1763), and Le Sage, (1668—1746). Marivaux had a good deal of Richardson’s power of delicate portrait painting, by an accumulation of miniature touches: nor is he deficient in the power of managing the interesting situations with which his Mariamne especially abounds. And certainly, if we except Mademoiselle La Fayette’s pleasing romance of the Princess of Cleves, he may claim the merit of having been the first, in France, to reduce the novel from mere extravagance, both of incident and charac [7:19:353]ter, to the standard of natural feeling, and to present us with real beings, instead of fantastic creations of the imagination. His chief faults are his intolerable minuteness in trifles, and the affectation of the style, which is worthy of the society of the Hotel de Rambouillet. His best novel, too, the Mariamne, terminates abruptly and inartificially, with a conclusion like that of Zadig, “where nothing is concluded.”

Prevot had a much higher and more romantic imagination than Marivaux. He threw into the novel something of the gloom and grandeur of tragedy; and hence he has been termed by some of his countrymen the Crebillon of romance. A visionary disposition and an ardent temperament had hurried him through a restless and passionate life, in which good and evil, suffering and enjoyment, had been scarcely blended; so that to the task of composition he brought the results of a mournful experience in aid of the resources of the imagination. To use the expression of Voltaire, “Il n’etait pas sculement un auteur mais un homme, ayant connu et senti les passions.” Prevot is not a great inventor of character; for to all his heroes, Cleveland, Patrice, even the Chevalier des Grieux, he appears to have lent much of his own feelings and his own peculiarities of mind. Though an extremely voluminous novelist, none of his works appear now to be read or recollected, except his painful but powerful story of Manon E Escaut, a tale of crime and profligacy, strangely blended with generous feeling, which has been translated into English by Charlotte Smith. Manon EEscaut, though little more than an episode, thrown off apparently with an easy negligence, bears the impress of genius, which it would be difficult to recognise in an authentic form in any of the larger productions of Prevot. Opening in the most unpromising manner, with what appears to be the common-place history of a vicious and discreditable connexion between Des Grieux and Manon, in which weakness of principle on the one side is made the dupe of profligacy and vanity, united with personal charms, on the other, the stream of feeling, at first polluted and turbid, works itself purer as it runs; and the scenes rise into elevation just as the character of Manon herself, the “fair mischief” of the romance, around whom Prevot has thrown no common fascination, changes from the selfish mistress into the faithful companion, following the fortunes of her husband, whom her charms had ruined, into disgrace and banishment, and dying by his side among the wiids of America.

Love also forms the subject of the novels of Madame de Tencin, (died 1749), the Siege of Calais and the Count de Comminges, which are admired for their tenderness and delicacy, qualities we should hardly have anticipated from a lady who stood in so confidential a relation to the cardinal Dubois, and who left her illegitimate child, d’Alembert, to the tender mercies of the public.

The greatest of the French novelists, however, is Le Sage. Even in his first romance, the Diable Boiteux, the plan of which has been suggested by the Diablo Cojuelo of Luis Velez de la Guevara, and which appeared in 1707, the wit, the graceful lightness, and the good-humoured sagacity of observation, which distinguished the character of Le Sage, were evident. The conception, in particular, of his esprit follet, a “diable bon-homme,” with so much more gaiety than malice, that at times we are tempted to think him rather amiable than otherwise, was a great improvement on Guevara’s; and the effect of the work was heightened by the skill with which he contrived to interweave with the story, if such it can be called, a multitude of contemporary allusions. Such indeed was its popularity and immediate sale, that two young men are said to have fought a duel in a bookseller’s shop about their right to the only remaining copy; a well attested anecdote, so much in the spirit of those satirical traits in which Asmodeus indulges, that as Sir Walter Scott remarks, it deserved to be recorded by the demon himself.

The reputation as a novelist which these most amusing revelations of Asmodeus had founded, was brought to its height by the production of the first three volumes of Gil Blas, bringing the history down to the retirement to Lirias; a work, with the exception of Don Quixote, perhaps the most universally popular in fictitious writing, pleasing equally, whether read in youth, in manhood, or in age, and containing, as has been justly said, more “useful knowledge,” than twenty scientific and moral treatises. Le Sage’s celebrated novel represents the level of life as it appears in a large capital, without either its brightest lights or its darkest shadows. He exhibits the average state of feeling among such communities,—loving virtue and good conduct within due bounds, but, at the same time, with that natural toleration for selfishness, servility, vanity, or occasional deviations from the path of strict integrity, which in such society is certain to be engendered and countenanced. As he saw nothing like an elevated morality in the world with which he was best acquainted,—the Parisian public,—so he has not attempted to introduce any such exalted tone of feeling into his romance. His hero is an adventurer, to whom a hundred parallels might probably have been pointed out any evening among the audiences at the Foire, with fair abilities, with a kindly heart, and naturally good inclinations, but little moral firmness; by no means so enamoured of the straight road of right as not to turn aside occasionally when the deviation suits his purposes; duped at first by his own vanity, and then availing himself of his dear-bought experience to take his revenge on others in the same coin, but still with a gradually increasing preference for good conduct and virtue, and a secret determination, when a favourable opportunity offers, and his fortune is made, of becoming in due course an honest man.

To this conception of an agreeable rogue, refined partly by good feeling, and partly by calculation, into a better being, Le Sage has imparted a wonderful air of particular, combined with general truth; for though Gil Bias is the representative of so wide a class, that almost all must acknowledge at times some common, and perhaps not very flattering features of resemblance between ourselves and him, he preserves throughout his whole career the most distinct individuality of character. Nor are the other subsidiary agents of the novel deficient in distinctness and clearness of portraiture. Sangrado, Scipio, the sleek Ambrose de Lamela, the eloquent but apoplectic archbishop, are made to stand before us. The historical personages have the same look of truth. Lerma and Olivarez, in particular, are admirably painted; so much so, that some Spanish critics, like De l’Isla and Llorente, have zealously maintained that Le Sage merely translated from some unknown Spanish manuscript which he had plundered. These critics reason, in fact, in such an ingenious way, as to make the accuracy or inaccuracy of Le Sage’s Spanish pictures equally available for their argument. If he be perfectly correct in his portraits of manners, and his allusions to Spanish customs, that part of the work, they maintain, could not have been written by any but a Spaniard. If he falls into mistakes, it is equally clear that these apparent slips were introduced by him on purpose to hide the source of his depredations, and to confuse, like Cacus, the traces of his retreat. It is needless to say that the statement, at least as made in this unqualified form, is totally incorrect. Le Sage had no doubt thoroughly imbued himself with the spirit of the Spanish humour, as it appeared in Cervantes, and the writers of the Picaresco school; and, as already said, he borrowed liberally incidents from various Spanish romances; but he lent to the whole a point, gaiety, and philosophy, which presented the old materials with all the appearance of novelty, and the charm of an original invention. “All is easy and good-humoured, gay, light, and lively; even the cavern of the robbers is illuminated with a ray of that wit with which Le [7:19:354]Sage enlightens his whole narrative. It is a work which renders the reader pleased with himself and with mankind; where faults are placed before him in the light of follies rather than vices; and where misfortunes are so interwoven with the ludicrous, that we laugh in the very act of sympathizing with them. All is rendered diverting, both the crimes and the retribution which follows them.” ^[22. Sir Walter Scott’s Lives of the Novelists— Le Sage. ]

Though Le Sage rightly considered his characters as his chief object, he was well aware of the pleasing relief which might be given to his story by the judicious combination of the repose of landscape painting with the bustle of incident; and though he does not succeed in bringing before us, with the vividness of Cervantes, the sombre and parched plains or rugged mountain scenery of Spain, his work contains some country pictures, in a style of placid beauty, which are models of stillness, comfort, and serenity. To whom, for instance, does not that modest demesne at Lirias, watered by the Guadalaviar, with its mansion-house of four little pavilions, its garden bordered with orange trees, and ornamented with its basin of white marble, and the quaint, respectable, old Moorish furniture of the apartments, not to mention the olla podridas of Master Joachim, and the revenue of five hundred ducats a-year, rise up before the mind’s eye, as the very ideal of that happy rural retreat which, to each of us, is to be the Euthanasia of a life of carefulness and toil; making us long for the time when we may be able to say with its fortunate possessor,

“Inveni portum; spes et fortuna valete Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios."

It is unnecessary to dwell long on the romances of the younger Crebillon, (1707—1777), as to which the only circumstance which is remarkable is, that so much frivolity of manner, and real poverty of invention, could have obtained a temporary popularity even by the licence in which they indulged; yet that they were very popular for a time, we know; for Sterne represents his fille de chambre inquiring, at a circulating library, for the Egarements du Coeur et de l’Esprit, in 1768. French writers, however, appear to recognise in his pictures some resemblance to the society of the time; for D’Alembert says of him, “he draws with a delicate and just pencil the refinement, the shades, and the graces of our vices.”

Much higher talent, though, like Crebillon’s, stained by a shameful association with licentious and profligate pictures, appears in the romances of Diderot, (1713—1784). His talent as a narrator, in particular, was scarcely inferior to Voltaire’s. He had the picturesque particularity of Richardson, with a more condensed expression. It is not, however, in his larger and more notorious romances, such as the Religeuse, that this talent is displayed. In these the tedium is as conspicuous as the indecency and impiety. It is in such short talcs as ΐHistoire de Mademoiselle de la Chaux, or Les Deux Amis de la Bourbonne, short popular simple histories, contrasting strongly with that air of false simplicity, in reality tricked out with sentimental fard and tinsel, which Marmontel (1719—1798) has given to his amusing, but not very moral tales.

The romances of Voltaire, (1694—1778), such as Zadig, the Princess of Babylon, Babouh and Candide, have but slender pretensions to the title. They are chiefly satirical fictions, or illustrations, in the form of a tale, of irreligious or antisocial opinions. Their wit, their biting irony, their familiarity with the baser parts of human nature, their power of rendering trifles pleasing by the art of narration, are undeniable; but we must not look in them for probable incident, for Voltaire generally chooses, as if on purpose, some extravagant oriental groundwork as his canvass, and borrows from Ariosto, from Gulliver, from the Arabian

Nights, or any source which suits his purpose ;—nor for the delineation of natural characters, for both the incidents and personages are merely made the instruments for working out the preconceived theorem. They produce their effect, such as it is, not by their fidelity to nature, but by the ingenious malice with which its features are distorted.

From the time of Marivaux downwards, the tendency of the French novel had been to narrow the province of incident, and to extend proportionally that of sentiment. With Rousseau, (1712—1778), this tendency reaches its height. The description of feelings, and particularly of such as, though often experienced, are seldom expressed in words, was his peculiar field. Invention, either of character or incident, he has none. To paint one strong passion, to invest vice with an air of insane but reasoning morality,

“To make matinées beautiful, and cast O’er erring deeds and thoughts a heavenly hue of words like sunbeams, dazzling as they past this is the main aim of his Julie, and the only one in which Rousseau has been at all successful. Even in this respect, too, the declamatory tone, the continued delirium of feeling, the total want of repose, which characterise the work, combined with the pedantry of its dissertations, become painful and oppressive. “Ce sont des amans,” said Rousseau himself, speaking of his characters, “et non pas des académiciens.” Never was an apology more misplaced. The real fault of Julie and St. Preux is, that they have both too much of the academician in their composition, and too little of the lover, so far as the expression of natural passion in simple words is concerned. We have never been able, in reading the romance, to persuade ourselves that its real eloquence was not as dubious as its morality. It is not easy, indeed, in perusing Rousseau’s apostrophes to purity and virtue, to avoid thinking of the strange commentary which his practice furnished to his theory. It was said of Sterne with severity, but perhaps with some justice, that he could bestow upon a dead ass the pity which he denied to a living mother. And the man of nature and of truth, who expends his trembling sensibilities on paper, suffers a fellow-servant to be punished for the theft he had himself committed, and provides for his natural children in the foundling hospital.

The total corruption of an exhausted society, tottering to its fall, with tile external varnish of gaiety and wit by which it tried to gild its decay, are aptly represented in the licentious romances of Louvet and La Clos; its still more vulgar profligacy in the coarse and incoherent, but occasionally striking and original novels of Restif de la Bretonne, (1734—1806). The works of the two former writers are unfortunately but too well known; the numerous and hasty productions of the eccentric printer, who was accustomed often to set up his strange compositions in type, without a manuscript, as the ideas occurred to him, are now almost completly forgotten. Yet Schiller and several eminent German critics, have spoken with high approbation of the vigour and talent which they evince in some parts, however defective or revolting in others. “I have scarcely imagined any thing,” says Restif, in his Drame dc la Vie; “I have simply related; my life has been so full of events, that I have made four-and-twenty volumes out of it.” Any one, indeed, who writes, as Laharpe says of Restif in his Correspondence Russe, under the persuasion, that all that he had seen, and thought, or learnt, deserved to be printed, and who acted faithfully on that principle, could hardly fail to produce compositions with very nearly the merits and demerits of the novels of Restif; that is to say, with the coarseness of feeling which was natural to the man, with the disjointed air which a set of unconnected incidents from life must present, and yet with that degree of freslmess and truthfulness of painting, which sketches from life almost invariably possess,
[7:19:355]

however humble or disagreeable may be the department from which they are drawn. His best novel is usually considered to be the Paysan Perverti, which appeared inl776∙

Two writers may be pointed out, however, about this period, who were the representatives, if not of better taste, at least of better feelings.

Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737—1814) may be regarded as the connecting link between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century: a graft of Fenelon upon Rousseau. His pathos no doubt often merges in a weakly sentimentalism; but the calm idyllic beauty of the Paul and Virginia and the Indian Cottage (1789—1792) was not without its use in restoring to French literature a feeling for nature and its simple enjoyments, and the acknowledgment of a Providence, a belief which both philosophy and fiction had for some time past been labouring to obliterate.

The defects of St. Pierre, with very little of his redeeming excellencies, appear in the Atala, Rene, and Natchez of Chateaubriand. He is, no doubt, in some departments an original thinker, and a man of a poetical imagination, though a degree of vagueness and mysticism mingles even with the best of his works; but as a novelist, his sickly sentiment and exaggeration of feeling are fatal to his success.

When the limbo of the Revolution, after its billowy heaving, began to settle again into something like a calm, under the despotism of the Consulate, the novel took the direction of broad and extravagant humour, derived from the gaieties and vulgarities of middle life,and,as might naturally be expected, liberally sprinkled with indecency, in the voluminous novels of Pigault Le Brun,—to whom it would be unfair to deny considerable powers of broad mirth, and a fertility in imaginary burlesque situations, which remind us of Smollett. But the questionable character of the novel-writing of this period is not universal. In the tales of Madame Cottin, the authoress of Elizabeth and Mathilde, a pure morality, and feminine tenderness, reappear; and though those of Madame de Staël, with all their eloquence, occasionally inculcate more doubtful lessons, her genuine admiration for pure and elevated feeling, prevents her from willingly lending her talents to the palliation of vice. The novels of Madame de Staël, however, are far more German in their character than French.

The works of the literary veteran, Nodier, certainly owe their attractions more to the charms of a beautiful style than to their substance. Throughout his whole course he has been but an imitator, putting on successively the manner of other writers. The Werther of Goethe appears to have first given the tone to his novels, and the passionate energy and wild complaints of the German suicide were reproduced in his tale of Therese Aubert. To the influence of Goethe succeeded that of Byron, and the spirit of the Corsair and Lara were infused into the Bandit Jean Shogar. From Byron he passed to Scott, whom he has imitated in his Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail, a production, the effect of which, though meant to be serious and pathetic, is unintentionally of the most comic kind, for the “tricksy spirit” of Argyle in the hands of Nodier becomes one of the most absurd of supernatural conceptions. In his Smarra again, a Thessalian story in the manner of the sorceries and diableries in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, he seems to have been influenced by the German night pieces of the school of Hoffmann; and he certainly succeeds almost as well as his German master, in producing a strange ephialtic effect by a cloud of misty murky phantoms, which pass before us as if in a feverish and uneasy dream.

With the restoration of the Bourbons, some degree of external decency, at least, distinguished the productions of the French press, though still the license which its novelists permitted to themselves in their comic works, and the extravagant and terrible cast of their more tragic stories, indicated at once a looseness of morality, and a coarseness of taste, which might, in some measure, have prepared the world for that strange and revolting spectacle which the literature of fiction has presented in France, since the Revolution of 1830. The manner of Pigault le Brun, was imitated and improved upon by Paul de Koch; for, adopting his principle of drawing chiefly from middle life, and his love for the representation of comic mischances, he has thrown into the best of his novels, scenes of simple humour, of tenderness, and even of powerful passion, to which the novelist of the Revolution had made no pretensions. To sneer at him as a Parisian cockney, or as the romance writer of the Grisettes, is easy; but we are much mistaken if his tales, homely and even coarse as they may be, will not be read when the atrocities of Sue and Masson, and the delicate depravities of Balzac, are forgotten.

In the higher sphere of romance, we have, during the same period, the earlier productions of Victor Hugo, Hans of Iceland, and Bug Jargal. Hans of Iceland, wild and extravagant as it is, is evidently not the work of an ordinary writer. A stern, savage northern spirit is breathed into the romance. Spiagudry, Orugix, even the monster from whom the tale derives its name, strange and ghastly creations as they are, exercise a certain fascination over the mind; and the youthful poet has turned to great account the dreary wilds, gloomy lakes, stormy seas, and ruined fortresses of Scandinavia. Bug Jargal was decidedly inferior to Hans of Iceland. The essential improbability in the character of a negro passionately in love with a white woman, and yet tempering the wildest passion with the deepest respect, is obvious; nor is that improbability disguised by the art with which Hugo has framed his story. There was more of genius, we think, in his Dernier Jour d’un Condamné, in which Hugo, like Sterne, has taken a single captive, shut him up in his dungeon, and then “looked through the twilight of the grated door to take his picture.” In this little work he has shown how a profound interest might be given to a mere register of sensations, and a dramatic movement imparted to a monologue, in which the scene shifts only from the Bicètre to the Conciergerie, the Hotel de Ville, and the Place de Grève. Hugo’s great novel, Notre Dame de Paris, appeared in 1831. It is needless to speak of a work which has been more than once translated into English; and the characteristics of which, the mingled genius and extravagance, the poetical spirit in which it is conceived, and the want of nature in the characters which it pourtrays, resembling distorted and hideous masques rather than men, are now very generally and correctly appreciated.

The popularity of the romances of Scott led about the same time to a multitude of imitations, by Jacob and others, of which the Cinq Mars of Alfred de Vigny appears to be generally considered the most successful.

We have no idea of entering on that mass of revolting performances, equally offensive to good morals and good taste, with which the French press has teemed since 1830; and which we are but too happy to consider, with the French themselves, as a literature of transition. This school of blood and voluptuousness, funereal horrors and drunken orgies, the transitions in which remind one of the stage arrangement in the Rehearsal,—“the coffin opens, and a banquet is discovered,”—we feel assured, can be of no long duration; and already we believe, that the French public begin to feel that they have had enough of the endless Balzac, and Janin, and Sue, and Soulie, and Masson, and the other labourers in this Montfaucon of fiction. As for Madame du Devant, or George Sand,—the Chevalier d’Eon of French literature,—a being whose sex it would be impossible to ascertain from her works, with the warm passions and headlong eloquence of the woman, and the audacious speculation of the man ;—while the principles which she labours to inculcate, are of the most odious na[7:19:356]ture; and the cynical hardihood with which she paints scenes from which any woman would turn aside, is perhaps the very worst proof which French literature at present presents of a degraded standard of delicacy and right feling among the female sex, we cannot deny that she appears to us to possess far greater talent, even genius, though misdirected, than any of the other ephemeral novelists to which we have alluded. In particular, she has an imagination singularly alive to natural beauty; her pictures of scenery are frequently captivating; and one evening landscapeof Venice, in her Lettres Venetiennes, has the combined charm of deep sensibility and truth. By far the most pleasing of her novels, because it in a great measure keeps in the background her peculiar opinions, is André. And yet even the general purity and right feeling of the tale is marred and interrupted by some passages which English readers at least would wish to blot.

The field of the novel or romance is not that which has been cultivated in Germany with the most success. The labourers indeed have been many, the produce most abundant, but the quality of the harvest is at best equivocal. Down to the time of Goethe and Tieck, the German literature of fiction was almost entirely imitative, deriving both its form and spirit from other nations. Since their time, if it presents a greater air of originality, it has generally assumed a character so fantastic, so unreal, so unlike all that we have been accustomed to associate with the idea of a novel, that it is extremely difficult to comprehend what is really the conception of the word entertained in Germany.

As we have no very high idea of the German prose fictions, the space which we propose to devote to them will be extremely limited; for we shall confine ourselves to a mere indication of the successive phases which the German romance has presented. In doing so, it seems unnecessary to go back beyond the latter portion of the eighteenth century, or to revive the names of works and authors which even the Germans themselves have forgotten, The earlier part of the eighteenth century had been occupied with numerous imitations of the Robinson Crusoe of Defoe, or of the family pictures of Richardson, the merits of which are not of a nature to demand notice in the present sketch.

In the Greek romances of Wieland, (1763—1812), such as the Agathon, the Aristippus, Peregrinus Proteus, and Agathodiimon, the same didactic tendency is observable which distinguishes those of Voltaire, but without their cy-nyical and mocking tone, and with a much greater power, if not of actually inventing character, at least of working up the scanty materials furnished by history into a consistent and plausible portrait of the historical personages of antiquity; as in his Socrates, and still more perhaps in his Aristippus. The main fault of his novels, besides this didactic tone, which pervades them all, is the frequent repetitions which they contain of the same views and personages. Agathon in one manner, and the Abderites in the other, contain the germ of almost all Wieland’s other writings. The sceptical Hippias, for instance, only puts off’ the Athenian stole in Agathon, to assume the mantle of the Calendar; the Danae of that novel revives again in Theo-clea and Devidassi; the youth of Athagon, in Delphi, is the prototype of that of Peregrinus in Parium; and many such instances must occur to any one familiar with Wieland. He is a mannerist, in short, as to his matter, and the mannerism extends even to his style, which, though flowing and facile, has not a little of the solemn loquacity of Boc-c lccio. This diffuseness is less felt in his shorter tales, where his philosophy is not so obtrusively displayed; and for this reason we prefer hisZ>on Sylvia de Rosalva,— the history of a quixotic believer in fairyism, gradually converted to common sense by the extravagant demands which are made upon his belief, assisted by the charms of a mortal beauty,— and his little romance of the Salamander and the Statue, to his more elaborate and aspiring compositions.

The influence of the novels of Richardson and of Fielding reappears about this time in a liberal effusion of family novels, some pourtraying the serious and sentimental, others the comic aspect of domestic life. Among the sentimental novelists, Augustus La Fontaine (1758—1831) may be considered as the most successful, and undoubtedly the most popular. He painted life as he had seen it iii the little German towns, villages, and chateaux of respectable proprietors about him, or as he had witnessed it during his campaigns as army chaplain, without ornament or alteration, without any pretension to imagination; and though there is at times something vulgar and tawdry in his sentimentalism, there is also a great deal of quiet simple nature in such scenes of common life and domestic happiness as he has exhibited in his family of Haller; and a tone of frankness and good humour, which carries the reader pleasingly along through incidents and characters that in themselves are common-place enough.

The comedy of family life found numerous representatives, of whom Wetzel, Müller, Schulz, and Hippel, attracted some notice in their day and generation. Even yet the Siegfried von Lindenberg of Müller, which appeared about 1779, and of which many editions have appeared, may be admitted to be a natural and amusing performance.

A union of the sentimental with the comic in these domestic pictures was attempted at a somewhat later date in the very singular novels of Richter, (1763—1825), a man of high powers, which he knew not how to use. and which were alloyed in no common degree by false taste, and an incurable affectation of singularity. His earliest novel, the Gronlandische Processe, appeared in 1784. The tricks and claptraps to which Sterne occasionally descends, we find habitual with Richter. The very titles of some of his works, such as Selections from the Papers of the Devil, or Recreations under the Cranium of α Giantess, and the absurd devices by which he generally introduces his narration, as in the Hesperus, where a series of letters is represented as mysteriously conveyed to the author in letter-bags tied round the neck of a shock-dog, betray a mind anxious to astonish by fantastic conceits, and insensible to the beauty of simplicity. The constant recurrence of these instances of literary quackery, the want of connexion which his chaotic narrations exhibit, combined with the visionary cast of his views, justifying his own remark, that the empire of the Germans was peculiarly that of the air, has been fatal, and we think justly, to all attempts to naturalize Richter in this country. His pathos we think in the worst style of false, and often meaningless, effusions of sentimentality; but as a quiet humourist, blending good feeling with his satire, he is often very successful. In this respect we admit the truth of the observations of Mr. Carlyle, from whose estimate of Richter’s genius we in other respects fundamentally differ: “It is on the strength of this, and its accompanying endowments, that his main success as an artist depends. His favourite characters have always a dash of the ridiculous in their circumstances, in their composition, perhaps in both. They are often men of no account, vain, poor, ignorant, feeble; and we scarcely know how it is that we love them; for the author all along has been laughing no less heartily than we at their ineptitudes. Yet so it is; his Fibel, his Fixlein, his Siebenkâs, even his Schmelzle, insinuate themselves into our affections; and their ultimate place is closer to our hearts than that of many more splendid heroes. This is the test of true humour; no wit, no sarcasm, no knowledge, will suffice; not talent, but genius, will accomplish the result.”

A strong contrast to these pictures of ordinary life, whether serious or comic, was presented by the mass of roman[7:19:357]ces connected with the feudal periods in Germany, which appeared from about 1780 to 1800, and formed the counterpart of the Ritter-stiicken or chivalrous dramas, with which the stage had been inundated since the example had been set by Goethe’s Goetz ofBerlichingen and Babo’s Otho of Wittelsbach. Cramer, Spiess, Schlenkert, and Veit Weber, (Leonhard Wachter), were the favourite writers of this turbulent school of fiction, which in all probability took its rise from the popularity of the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe. Their materials were the blood-stained period of Faustrecht and Vehm-Gerichte, feudal tyrants, suffering damsels, devoted knights, with abundance of single combats and splintering of lances, raising of trap-doors, escapes by sliding pannels, imprisonments in bottomless dungeons, murders, witchcraft, and apparitions; in short, all that apparatus of the terrible, which, even in such hands, has a certain fascination for the boy, but awakens only a feeling of the ridiculous in the man.

Another department of German fictions likewise dealing with the marvellous, but fortunately cultivated by writers of a very different order of talent, was the Mahrchen, or legendary tale. Three different modes may be pointed out in which this class of subjects has been treated.

The first is exemplified in the Volhsmarchen, or popular tales of Musaeus, in which the groundwork of marvellous tradition which the writer has selected is treated, not in the spirit of belief, but of a laughing scepticism, and where the writer relies for effect, not so much upon the interest of his materials, as upon the wit, the satirical allusions, and the quaintdescription or broad drollery which he is able to infuse into the original legend. Whatever in such traditions bordered upon awe or terror, Musaeus rejected; he viewed even these creations of the fancy in a prosaic light, and selected only such features as could be wrought into his ingenious mosaic of fanciful marvel, picturesque description, and sly and somewhat irreligious pleasantry, in the style of Voltaire. What he attempted, however, he accomplished with success. Some of his tales, such as Sturnme Liebe, (Dumb Love), and Melechsala, might be cited as models of the art of combining the childish interest of a nursery tale with that shew of irony or philosophy which affords even to grave personages an apology for the perusal of popular tales.

In this semi-derisive style of treating the traditionary legends of his country, Musaeus remains the solitary writer of talent. This natural tendency of the German mind towards earnestness and belief, even in the case of the marvellous, led to a very decided preference of the serious manner in the treatment of such themes. And undoubtedly at the head of this second mode of treating the legend stands Ludwick Tieck, (born 1773). Questionable as we think his claims areto the highest distinction, either as a poet or a novelist, in the proper sense of the term, his success in the management of traditional marvels in a poetical spirit is undeniable. He seems without an effort to throw himself back into the spirit of primitive and superstitious periods, when the agency of an invisible world formed an article of belief, and exercised the strongest influence over the conduct of life; a time of supposed prodigies, and omens, and secret charms, whose agency pervaded and controlled the course of nature. In reading the best of these legends of Tieck, such as The Fair Eckbert, The Love Charm, or Peter ofAbano, we feel that he has the power of carrying us back in advanced age into the very realm of Fairyland, and subjecting us anew to the influences of childhood. “These legends have a freshness about them like that of the earliest morning, a sweetness as of wild flowers, and a calm beauty, caught as it were from a radiant sunset or a rising morn. The reader of the Runenberg is brought face to face with the presiding spirits of the animal and vegetable kingdoms; now he feels as if he were embosomed in luxurious vegetation, bathed in fertilizing dew, and fanned by balmy zephyrs, and now as if he were transported to cavern depths or darkest mines, where mountain spirits exercise an unholy influence. All the other legends, The Fair Eckbert, The Fairies, and The Trusty Eekhart, have the same beauty and significance; but it is impossible by mere description to give any idea of their peculiar nature. They must be studied and felt to be at all understood.” ^[23. Germany, ]

We are here speaking of Tieck merely as the writer who has treated the traditional tale in the most poetical spirit. Within the domain of the novel, taking the term even in a very extensive sense, our estimate of his powers will be very different.

The mode of treating the legendary lore of Germany, of which the tales of Tieck had furnished the first example, as the most agreeable to the national character, soon found numerous, or, it might rather be said, numberless imitators. For the last thirty years, the example of Tieck has been implicitly followed; and all the legendary novelists of Germany have been melancholy and gentlemanlike, after the pattern of the Phantasus. Of these the writers best known to English readers, through translation, are the Baron de la Motte Fouque, the author of Undine, the Magic Ring, and Sintram; Chamisso, the author of Peter Schlemihl; and Apel, the author of the Freyschu,tz. It may be doubted whether better specimens of the German tale might not be selected from writers with which the English public is not familiar,—some of Henrich Steffens’ short legendary stories in particular,—such as, the Sleeping Bride, (Die Sclilafende Braut) and the Nightly Betrothal in the Church ofRorwig, (Die Nachtliche trauung im Kirche Rδrwig), which have not yet found a translator, appear not undeserving of the attention of the lovers of the marvellous. In the wild productions of Achim von Arnim, such as the Countess Dolores, and Isabella of Egypt, traits of talent sparkle in the midst of absurdity. And from the works of Clemens Brentano, and of Zhokke, the author of Abelino, several interesting legends might be selected. In particular, we are surprised that the simple and beautiful legendary tale by the former, “The History of the Brave Kasperl and the Fair Annerl,” is yet untranslated.

The third form in which the Mahrchen was employed, but, at the same time, perverted from its proper purpose, and subjected to a more Mezentian union than it had submitted to even under the satirical despotism of Musaeus, was in the fantastic or grotesquely terrible manner introduced by Hoffmann, and, since his death, so injudiciously and unsuccessfully imitated both in Germany and in France. Hoffmann’s manner cannot be considered as entirely original, since an approach to it may be pointed out in the Diable Amoureux of Cazotte. It is singular, however, that his productions, such as the Sandman, the Magnetizer, the Devil’s Elixir, and others of that class, deriving their whole interest and effect from their connexion with the peculiar nature and idiosyncrasy of the writer’s mind, and so incapable of being imitated with the least success by any one not possessing the same anomalous mental conformation and physical irritability with the Prussian judge, should have exercised a very decided though temporary influence over the literature, not merely of Germany, but of Europe; and it proves that, notwithstanding the extravagances, there does reside in them some charm,—something which appeals successfully, not, indeed, to the mind in its calmer mood, but to the imagination when in a state of temporary excitement. Only in such a mind as Hoffmann’s, moulded into its existing shape by an ill-omened union of influences, mental and bodily, habitually haunted with gorgons and presentiments, seeing traces, as it were, of the devil’s hoof in the commonest paths of life, and starting [7:19:358] and trembling at the chimaeras with which his imagination peopled solitudes—could the phantoms bred in his eccentric brain, and nurtured amidst the fumes of a Berlin tavern, have ever assumed that appearance of reality and belief which could render their introduction into a work of fiction at all practicable. Only by a mind accustomed, from a painful experience, to brood over and dissect the origin and connexion of these strange phenomena, half mental half physical, which make “life a dream,” but with a nightmare accompaniment, could the possible connexion of this phantasmagoria with real existence, in morbid minds, be rendered so far intelligible as to redeem them from the charge of the merest puerility. Hoffmann’s tales, though they constantly suggest the idea that they have had their source in tile inspiration of opium, seem really to be the only compositions in this style of grotesque horror, which can be said to possess the redeeming quality of genius. They remind us of the images of our dreams, calling up before us, as in sleep, long perspectives of gloomy vastness, broken here and there by the light of the strangest ignes fatui, along which are seen, flitting in antic movements, bands of the most fantastic creatures, such as those which, in the pictures of Teniers, disturb the solitude of St. Anthony, or which give a strange blending of the humorous and the horrible to the distempered sketches of Callot. Yet, as a proof that the talent of Hoffmann was by no means confined merely to the fantastic and the supernatural, we may notice his truthful and vigorous picture of the German burgher life of the middle ages, in his Master Martin and his Apprentices, and his Mademoiselle de Scudery, a tale of vivid and fascinating interest, founded on a historical groundwork, moving in the simplest and most direct manner towards its object, and exciting the feeling of curiosity and suspense even to the last.

Some notoriety of an evil kind was obtained by a class of novels, in which the attempt was made to invest sensuality with the graces of art, or to merge art in sensuality. Such were the Ardιnghello of Heinse (1749—1803), in which painting was made the apology for the introduction of voluptuous pictures, and his Hildegard von Hohenthal, in which music was made to minister to a similar purpose,— no unfit sequel to a literary life which commenced with a translation of Petronius. In truth, in the whole range of the German novels, the tendency to an undue license of this kind is observable. In those of Goethe, though veiled by an appearance of decency, it is sufficiently perceptible; nor does Tieck appear free from the common taint. Many passages in Wilhelm Meister are highly objectionable; and such a novel as the Wahlverwandschaften we regard as untranslateable into English.

Of Goethe’s novels we have already expressed our opinion in our biographical article on Goethe himself. If the merits of a novel consisted, not in exhibiting an epitome of human life, more or less poetically conceived, according to the prosaic or imaginative turn of the writer’s mind, but in speculating ingeniously on painting, agriculture, landscape, gardening, the rules of good composition, or the state of the theatre, connecting these speculations by a thread of mystical narrative, and introducing us to a set of beings without the least trace of reality about them, who all appear to be playing some theatrical part in a dreamy representation of life, which seems to have no intelligible object,—Goethe may be a great novelist. With an English public, demanding some firm basis of reality, instead of that unsubstantial cloud-land which envelopes us in the Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre, and accustomed to insist on a plain meaning as a preliminary to poetical embellishment, he never can be a favourite. A novel which does not explain its purpose without a commentary, seems to violate the essential laws of such compositions; but a novel, in regard to the object of which no two commentators agree, is an anomaly in literature. Most of the German critics, indeed, though professing a great admiration of these singular performances of Goethe, are careful to confine their observations, in regard to the meaning or object of the novels, to the merest generalities. They describe Wilhelm Meister, to use the congenial language of an English admirer, as a picture “of warm, hearty, sunny, human endeavour, a free recognition of life in its depth, variety, and majesty, but as yet nο divinity recognised there? The latter portion of the sentence is intelligible, and is unfortunately true, but the rest reminds us of Mr. Dangle’s remark, that the interpreter appears the harder to be understood of the two.

These observations apply, with slight modification, to the novels of Tieck, when be abandons the province of the traditional tale, and attempts subjects connected with real life; the characters, the incidents, the whole cast of the tale, appear so extravagant, that, but for the grave and laudatory criticism with which these effusions seem invariably to be received by his countrymen, it would be difficult to believe the author serious. His first romance, William Lover was a gloomy and revolting extravagance, and his later caprices, such as Das Alte Buch, (the Old Book), the Fo- gelscheuche, (Scarecrow), Eigensinn und Laune, (Self-will and Humour), Wundxrlichheiten, (Marvels), are utterly unworthy of a man of genius. Even the merits of his Dichterlxben, (a Poet’s Life), have been greatly exaggerated. Any tale, in which Marlowe and Shakespeare figure as actors, has a certain interest for a Briton; but beyond some eloquent disputations on the drama, and the formation of a poet’s mind, in which Shakespeare and his companions are made to utter modern German theories, the most opposite to English notions of the sixteenth century, we cannot perceive wherein the peculiar merit of this much-lauded performance lies. Tieck has said absurdly and presumptuously of Sir Walter Scott, that “it is surprising how little he wants to be a poet, but how much that little outweighs all that he is.” Let any one who has read Tieck’s Aufmhτ in den Cevennen, in which he has come in competition with the Scotch novelist on an historical subject, judge whether he has himself made a nearer approximation to that character.

The talent displayed by Schiller in his Verbreeher aus Eltre, and his fine fragment of the Armenian, or the Ghost Seer, excites regret that he did not give us less of philosophy’, and more of fiction. The latter is an unfinished tale of mystery,of deep interest, the idea of which, it is supposed, was suggested by the juggleries of Cagliostro, and in which Schiller, though he never witnessed the scenery which he describes, has caught the spirit of silence and secrecy which seems to pervade Venice, with the same success as, in his William Tell, he has transported us into the mountain recesses of the Oberland. And Lord Byron has recorded the strong impression made upon his mind by the recollection of the incomprehensible Armenian, one of those conceptions which he was accustomed by anticipation to associate with the image of the city of the sea.

Several female novelists, too, have respectably supported the pretensions of their sex; such as Fanny Tarnuw, the Baroness de la Motte Fouque, Johanna Schopenhauer, Henrietta Hanke, and Caroline Pichler, the able authoress of Agathocles. Many of their productions exhibit talent, grace, and facility of style, but we should be at a loss to name any for which the praise of genius could justly be claimed.

The class of romances called Krirninal Geschichten, turning on stories of secret guilt discovered by circumstantial evidence,has been a numerous one in Germany. At the head of this class of novelists stands Kruse, who certainly possesses in a high degree a power, which at the present day appears to be rather a rare one,—that of constructing an ingenious and complicated plot, keeping the curiosity constantly on the stretch, and defying conjecture as to the result, till the author[7:19:359]himself chooses to furnish the solution. The Ring, Oath and Conscience, Diodatis , Birth, the Dance of Death, and the Red Dragon, are masterpieces in this style of invention, which, though of a sufficiently prosaic character, yet possesses, at least, this cardinal merit, that it is rarely tedious.

Historical romances have always been numerous in Germany; and after the appearance of those of Sir Walter Scott, they became still more so. Some of the chivalrous pictures of Tromlitz, Van de Velde, and Blumenhagen in this style are spirited, but in general the historical romance of Germany does not rise above mediocrity. “Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plwa. Let us except the very remarkable tale of Michael Kohlhaas, by the unfortunate dramatist Kleist, (1776—1811). In all of Kleist’s tales there is too much of a spectral and fatalistic character; he delighted to contemplate and to delineate life as necessitated by a mysterious and iron destiny. Kohlhaas is not entirely free from a tinge of the supernatural, which harmonizes ill with the deep, humble, human interest of the tale itself; and no where does the idea of a grim and unrelenting fate appear in more saddening colours. There is truth, therefore, in Goethe’s remark as to this romance, that “it brings prominently into view a dissonant principle in nature, with which poetry ought not to meddle, with which it cannot reconcile itself, let the handling of the matter be never so exquisite.” And yet this vigorous and truthful picture from the Lutheran times, must be to English readers an object of interest, from the contrast it exhibits to the usual style of the German novel; for it is told with a directness, a simplicity, a dramatic liveliness, and an absence of unnecessary reflection, which are qualities of rare occurrence beyond the Rhine.

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